


Nothing to Prove

by canary



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Career Ending Injuries, Enemies to Lovers, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Nolan Patrick has big Virgo energy, Philadelphia Flyers, Slow Burn, Travis Konecny loves a bitch, dumbasses to lovers, insults: the sixth love language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:00:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21900829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canary/pseuds/canary
Summary: Nolan picked a college based on two criteria. One: That it didn’t have a hockey program. Two: That it was in some random corner of the southern USA, where the air was thick enough to bite, and football was the only sport anyone talked about in October.He should have known his dumb ass was still going to fuck it up.
Relationships: Nolan Patrick/OMC (background), Ryanne Breton/Claude Giroux, Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Comments: 239
Kudos: 1059





	Nothing to Prove

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was substantially written and outlined before Patty’s migraine diagnosis was made public, so it’s also AU in that respect.
> 
> Sincerest of thanks to Daisy (manybumblebees) and KT (subwaycars) for betas. 
> 
> CNs for several instances of folks engaging in fully-consensual (if not always well-advised) sex while under the influence of alcohol, and non-problematic recreational pot use.
> 
> The title is from Simple Song, by The Shins.

Nolan picked a college based on two criteria.

One: That it didn’t have a hockey program.

Two: That it was in some random corner of the southern USA, where the air was thick enough to take a bite out of on his visit in May, and football was the only sport anyone was going to talk about in October.

He should have known his dumb ass was still going to fuck it up.

See, the thing was: this was not how his life was supposed to _go_. Sure, he’d thought about college, maybe, if he decided not to declare for the WHL draft. Boston or North Dakota or Michigan or someplace like that, where the winter had teeth and there was a steady pipeline up to the NHL.

Because Nolan had the skills. Nolan had the drive. Nolan played on all the right teams and won all the right shit and ranked in all the right places.

Nolan had an entire closet stacked with trophies from juniors, but it turned out that in the end, Nolan didn’t have the right body. He would never forget waking up from his sixth surgery—the third on his fucking goddamned right shoulder alone—to his mom holding his hand, tears leaking out from under her eyelashes, while his dad leaned on her shoulder and said, “Nolan, we’ve got to talk about this.”

He’d been seventeen years old. Coming up on the draft.

And “this” had been, basically, the end of his life as he knew it.

He could still play hockey. His coaches, his dad, his uncle, everybody and their damned mom was clear that he could still play hockey.

He just wasn’t going to play in the NHL, and he was too fucking proud to settle for anything less.

So there it went. Poof.

He finished his last year of high school back in Winnipeg, not knowing what to do with all the time and space that suddenly yawned around his schedule. He did everything his physical therapist told him to do, not that it fucking mattered. He ran on the treadmill in the basement, listening to his feet pound over the mechanical whir of the belt. He helped his little sister with her homework. He went hunting with his dad and his uncles, and spent time at the shooting range, punching holes in paper targets. He got a part-time job at the gym his family belonged to, wiping down equipment and scanning membership passes from old ladies going to aquatics classes, and he only applied to colleges south of Washington, DC.

He deactivated every social media account he’d ever owned, then kept his phone off and avoided TVs. He didn’t want to hear one goddamned word about the draft, or one goddamned sentence from his mom that included the word “worried.”

Nolan got an email from his university in July, introducing him to his new freshman roommate. His name was Travis and he was from Philadelphia. Nolan opened his Instagram for the first time since March, and of course—of fucking course—the little scruffy-faced fucker had been busy playing in Pennsylvania’s state hockey tournament and then spending the rest of his senior year screwing around with his hockey bros. Clearly this fucking kid wasn’t good enough to play for real, but something stabbed in Nolan’s chest every time he thought about one stupid video where Travis made a tricky shot and then swung back around to the pile with his buddies, grinning like his face was going to split in half because he was so fucking _happy_.

Nolan deactivated his Insta again and proceeded to ignore every email fucking Travis sent him, from the initial “hey looking forward to meeting u bro” right on down to the “so do u want to bring a microwave if i get the minifridge” and even the admittedly mission-critical “xbox or playstation buddy, i gotta know.”

Fuck Travis. Fuck Travis _for real_.

He flew south on his own. His parents offered to go with him, but he told them not to bother—the university had a shuttle from the airport, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t been living away from home since he’d been fifteen years old anyway.

His mom cried in the airport, and Nolan could tell his dad was getting a little choked up too. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to happen, so he turned away for the security line as fast as he could, disappearing himself into the crowd of travelers.

International students were supposed to arrive for orientation two days before everybody else. He unenthusiastically participated in more icebreakers than he’d ever known existed. Listened to a bunch of earnest lectures from offices with names like Student Counseling Services and the Wellness Center. Got his immigration paperwork stamped. Rattled around in his empty white dorm room with its view over a swathe of immaculately green, green grass.

Day 3—or maybe more accurately FT Day for _Fucking Travis Day_—opened with a lot of bustle around the dorm, RAs putting the finishing touches on brightly-colored bulletin boards and what looked like a literal hundred volunteers descending on the freshman dorms to help everybody else get settled.

Also, fuck America. Where had Nolan’s helpful dickface in a cheerful red _Welcome to Campus!_ t-shirt been?

Maybe he would have known what time Travis was arriving if he’d looked at his email, but, fuck that. So he dragged himself back from breakfast in the dining hall across the quad—some sad-ass fake scrambled eggs and sadder-assed bacon that reminded him of every fucking breakfast he’d ever eaten on the road with the Wheat Kings—and to be one hundred percent honest he’d been feeling pretty fucking sorry for himself before breakfast, and now he felt even worse.

So of course, he was super-thrilled to see that Fucking Travis had descended on their 8x8 dorm room with his whole damned family. Mom, dad, brother, grandpa: they were all crammed in, energetic and loud and talking over each other, his parents in aggro Philly accents and his mom legitimately sobbing hard enough to get Fucking Travis’s _Benedictine Ice Hockey_ t-shirt damp.

It was a lot.

It was like, really, a _lot_ for Nolan, on both a personal and a cultural level. There had been a section of international student orientation about culture shock, which Nolan had thought was total bullshit—he was from Canada for fuck’s sake, not like, China—but maybe this was what it felt like: standing in the corner of the room where he allegedly lived, shaking FT’s brother’s hand and feeling the most like an outsider he’d ever felt in his entire life.

They had to leave eventually, though, because they only got to park their car for so long. FT walked them downstairs, and in the empty space after they left, Nolan saw the hockey shit piled in a corner. Sticks and a packed-full bag, tape jammed halfway into one of the side pockets.

It fucking reeked, like he was one of those gross assholes who thought washing his pads was going to make them disintegrate.

They also did not have a TV, a microwave, or a mini-fridge, or even a fucking coffee pot.

So things were like, definitely looking up.

Looking so far up that the first thing out of Nolan’s mouth when Fucking Travis got back (suspiciously red around the eyes) (not that Nolan gave one _single_ fuck) was, “Why the fuck did you bring hockey gear?”

FT clapped his hands to his face in some super-exaggerated fake shock bullshit. “Oh my god, it talks! Hi! It’s _so_ fucking nice to meet you, bud!”

Nolan rolled his eyes. It wasn’t his fucking fault he’d had better things to do with his summer than email with Fucking Travis, like get extra shifts at the gym or row his uncle’s canoe out to the middle of the pond and just lie on his back in the bottom, staring up at the clouds, not even bothering to bait his line. “But like, hockey shit. Why.”

“’Cause I’m gonna join the club team, fucking duh?”

“Club team.”

“Yeah?” FT narrowed his eyes at Nolan, like he wasn’t sure if Nolan was like, one of the international students who didn’t speak English. (Which, again, fuck this short-ass dude.) “Like, you know, we play in the most competitive club tier in the Mid-Atlantic? It’s not NCAA but it’s still kind of a big deal?”

“And you think _you’re_ gonna make it.”

“What, like _you_ fucking would? Who the fuck do you think you are, fucking Jonathan fucking Toews from fucking Winnipeg? Where’s your Yorkie, bud?”

Nolan sucked in a breath. Skating with Jonathan Toews was like, a highlight of his life. He’d come to skate with the U17 team before Worlds one morning, and shaking his hand had literally inspired Nolan to start to realize some shit about himself. (Shit he did not want to think about at this moment.) “You did _not_ just insult Jonathan Toews.”

It disintegrated from there. Nolan was not 100% sure it would not have come to physical blows if their RA, Wayne, hadn’t picked that moment to show up and drag them off for some forced bonding with the other guys on their hall. Nolan concentrated on trying to burn holes in the back of FT’s head with his eyes; FT periodically turned around and made faces at him, like he was fucking six years old.

The good news was that after they’d done a stupid activity about rules for their little hall-community, and talked about how to handle conflict with their roommates, fucking hilarious shit right there—it turned out that their RA’s idea of “bonding” was Mario Kart and a few boxes of pizza.

And let’s be real, Nolan had been honing his Mario Kart skills on junior hockey roadies for his entire _life_.

He had _trained_ for this moment, this moment right here: so that he could smoke Fucking Travis and his fucking Princess Peach bullshit.

They both maybe got way too into it. The RA started looking a little nervous when the other guys started dropping out, like this was not quite going how he’d planned.

And Nolan didn’t give one single fuck.

Because he fucking _won_, for the honor of Manitoba and Jonathan Toews and people everywhere who were not short-ass little bitches from Philadelphia.

He spiked his controller and maybe celebrated harder than when he’d won the fucking Ed Chynoweth Cup. Travis looked murderous, like he was going to try to smother Nolan with a pillow while he was sleeping.

Nolan would _love_ to see that bitch try.

They didn’t speak to each other for a while after the Mario Kart showdown. Or, Nolan didn’t talk and Travis talked _about_ him but not _to_ him, like, “Oh wow, really wish someone had answered my goddamned emails about the microwave,” directed into his desk drawer; or “Wouldn’t it be so fucking nice if we had an Xbox in here,” announced to the inside of his closet.

Unfortunately it turned out that the other guys on the hall seemed to kind of—suck. Maybe Nolan was just having culture shock again, but they all seemed to use the word _summer_ as a verb; wear a lot of pastel-colored shorts with like, lobsters and sailboats embroidered on them; and have names like Yates or fucking_Kingsley_, Nolan could not make that shit up.

At least Fucking Travis had a normal name and a lobster-free wardrobe.

Nolan hadn’t realized that was a bar that he was going to need America to clear, but there it was.

The next item on the hall bonding schedule was not led by their RA, but instead by one of the Yateses to his older brother’s frat house. Nolan could really use a fucking drink by that point, so he tagged along—beer was beer. Even if he had like, less than zero interest in listening to stories about smashing girls at lacrosse camp from some dude in a pink polo shirt.

“Sick,” he said, because the polo shirt seemed to be waiting for something from him.

The frat house looked pretty much like what Nolan would have imagined a frat house to look like: brick, white columns, a tall hedge lining the front yard to keep out the unworthy. Bud Lite cans had been kicked to the perimeter of the yard, and guys were starting to collect around a few beer pong tables. Some shirtless dude with an American flag bucket hat was yelling about Kappa’s Fresh Meat Pong Tournament.

Beer pong, Nolan could do.

“Want a partner,” he asked the polo shirt.

“Sorry, I’m playing with my buddy from the high school sailing team,” he answered. “Can’t break up the best high-performance two-man skiff in Taft School history, am I wrong?”

Nolan was still trying to parse that sentence when he joined the messy line for the keg. He’d grown up on the water and he’d had his boat license for years, but that was some next-level shit.

He was desperate enough to ask Travis, “What fucking planet are these dudes even from,” when they ended up near each other in the beer line.

“_Now_ you wanna talk,” he said, lifting his red cup in a sarcastic cheers motion.

Nolan took a healthy swig from his own beer. It tasted like watery piss, so exactly the same as the shit he’d been drinking in his buddies’ basements since he’d turned fourteen. At least some things were universal. “Do you even _see_ these assholes, though.”

“You’re drinking free beer, so. Buck up, buttercup.”

“It’s shit beer, though.” After a few more swigs he was pretty sure it was worse than Molson. Worse than Labatt, even. Coming to this country had been such a fucking mistake.

“It’s _free_ beer, princess.”

“That only matters cause your liquor laws are dumb as shit.”

Travis opened his mouth, paused, kind of wrinkled up his forehead under his snapback. “Yeah, okay. I’ll give you that.”

Nolan couldn’t say exactly how they ended up on the same beer pong team, except that maybe they were the only two normal people in a sea of whale shorts.

“Do you even have beer pong in Canada?” Travis asked him, all dubious and shit.

Nolan answered by sinking his first warmup shot, then bouncing in a second.

“I guess you do,” he said, because Travis was more than capable of holding up both sides of a conversation. Which was fine, honestly, since if Nolan wasn’t talking maybe they wouldn’t end up screaming at each other.

They ended up screaming at each other.

About like, nothing. Maybe that Nolan was “too good” at beer pong. Maybe that Travis “used the wrong rules,” and almost cost them the W in their semifinal matchup.

And then they got kicked out of Yates’s older brother’s frat, but not before they won the fucking beer pong tournament, so.

Suck on that, assholes.

They didn’t have anywhere to go but back to the dorm. It was a long walk, down a giant hill and all the way across campus. Fucking Travis was a fast walker, head down and hands shoved in his pockets, scowling under his snapback. Nolan watched the set of his shoulders from a few steps behind him. Wasn’t sure what the move was, or how long he and Travis had to slug it out before he could ask the RA for a room change.

That would be like, admitting defeat, though.

No one had ever said Nolan wasn’t competitive. “Defeat” wasn’t really in his vocabulary, no matter what hockey Twitter had to say about it.

And he could admit that, maybe, he should have answered Travis’s email about the Xbox. Maybe shouldn’t hold it against him that he was playing hockey, and Nolan wasn’t—even if it was bad hockey that Nolan wouldn’t want to play.

“Why did you come here, anyway?” Travis asked, and it took Nolan a second to realize that FT was talking to him. He was still looking down at the sidewalk. “It seems like you hate—everything.”

“I do not,” he answered, even though he did, kind of. There were things he liked: the pretty brick architecture, the green space, how it was a full 1,600 miles away from Winnipeg and two hours away from the nearest NHL team. He’d wanted to come somewhere like this, somewhere no one would give a shit who he was and somewhere he could have a real college experience, whatever the fuck that even meant.

“What’s one thing you like.”

“The gym. Football, probably.” He thought about it some more. Offered, “Winning at beer pong.”

Travis snorted down at the toes of his sneakers. “I did love watching those douchebags cry into their Solo cups.”

“They were so fucking sad.” Nolan paused. “What like, planet were they from? Is that a weird question, or.”

“What, you don’t have rich preppy assholes in Canada?”

They’d somehow drifted closer while they were talking, so Nolan could shrug in response. “It’s, I dunno. Different.”

“Yeah, like a lamer America.”

“Fuck you, okay. You can’t tell me Canada is _missing_ something by not having a bunch of dudes wearing shorts with lobsters on them.”

“Fine, that wasn’t my _favorite_ part about coming here. It’s just like, a lot of people from private schools in the Northeast end up here if they want a break from winter, so.” Travis angled a glance at him from the corner of his eye. “Did you do like, _any_ research before you picked a school? At all?”

“I knew what I didn’t want,” Nolan said, which was absolutely the truth.

“There are people here who don’t suck. Just gotta find ‘em, bud.” He smiled, a quick flicker that crinkled up his face. “I think there’s an activities fair tomorrow.”

“That sounds like a literal nightmare.”

“Gotta put yourself out there, bro.”

Nolan wanted to protest that Fucking Travis wasn’t his _bro_, actually, but he also felt like he’d had enough screaming for the day. So he just—didn’t answer, and Travis seemed fine with that.

The student activities fair was exactly as horrible as Nolan thought it would be: like two fucking hundred tables mazing around the quad, full of way too many hyper people wanting him to join every fucking club on campus. He could play Quidditch or Dungeons and Dragons (no thanks bud), volunteer at the humane society or with a community garden, take weekend trips to the national park with the Outdoors Club or learn how to snowboard.

He put his name down for the garden and the Outdoors Club, because they sounded soothing if he was being totally honest.

FT, meanwhile, was giving literally every cheerful girl in a club t-shirt his email.

“Bro,” Nolan said, after they’d stopped at like, the fifth table in a row (the 3D Printing Club) (why did anyone need a club about 3D printing). “You’re gonna get so many fucking spam emails.”

“Yeah, but like, I don’t know what I wanna do yet.”

“I don’t think you want to print shit in 3D _that_ much.”

“Maybe I do.” Even the captain of the USS Boundless Enthusiasm looked a little dubious, though. “That’s like, a thing I could want to do.”

“I thought you were looking for the hockey team.”

“Well, yeah, but I can’t _just_ play hockey.”

Nolan could have _just_ played hockey. But Nolan kept his fucking mouth shut about it, and declined to join the Aerial Yoga Club. Travis looked like he was thinking about stopping to write down his email, until Nolan grabbed the back of his t-shirt and physically dragged him down the line of tables.

If Nolan thought Travis was hyper before, he was unprepared for the full-body bouncing when they finally spotted the Big Red Club Ice Hockey banner.

“Oh my god, dude, that’s Claude Giroux!” Travis yelped, like. Well. Nolan would maybe—hypothetically—have yelped when he saw Jonathan Toews, except this was not a double Olympic gold medalist and Stanley Cup champion, this was a cranky ginger who looked like he was 30. At like, the absolute _minimum_.

“Who the fuck is Claude.”

“The captain! We emailed like, all summer.”

Nolan did not see Resting Ginger Bitchface returning a lot of Travis’s emails. “Sure you did.”

Travis pogo-ed over to the table. Nolan tried to act like he was suddenly interested in joining an improv comedy troupe, but it didn’t work, because Travis bounced right back and towed him towards the hockey table. “You’re Canadian and you know who Jonathan Toews is and you’re all like,” he waved a hand in the general vicinity of Nolan’s abs, “like built and stuff, you’ve got to have played hockey at least once in your life. Come onnn, Nolan.”

“This is a pretty competitive club,” Resting Ginger Bitchface said. “Most of our guys, you know. Played in high school or on travel teams or whatever.”

“But he’s like, Canadian?” Travis said, like that was the difference maker.

“I’m like, not interested,” Nolan said.

Of course Fucking Travis wrote his email down anyway.

Nolan deleted every email he got about tryouts.

But he did go to the interest meeting for the Outdoors Club. It seemed like a bunch of chill hippies who wanted to go smoke weed in the woods, and maybe climb a mountain from time to time.

Nolan was not specifically here for that, but he wasn’t _not_ here for that either.

They had a backpacking trip coming up over the Labor Day long weekend. Nolan signed up and gave them $35 in weird green American money.

Travis came back from the last day of tryouts looking thrilled with his life.

“It’s like, super early and I don’t want to jinx anything but like there’s a hole on the first line right wing and I feel like I can get it, buddy.”

“Wash your fucking gear,” Nolan said. He’d emptied a bottle of Febreeze over Travis’s bag and it had made no impact.

“I won State in those pads,” Travis huffed, like he was all offended. “I can’t wash them.”

Travis had an early class on Thursday. Nolan took the opportunity to dump all his shit in one of the big coin-operated washing machines in the basement of their dorm. His older sister Madison would call that some _big Virgo energy bullshit_, but Nolan had not quit hockey and moved to America to keep smelling rank-ass pads every day of his life.

The resulting fight was loud enough to draw a crowd of spectators and the RA from down the hall.

The RA waded into the middle and suggested that they _give each other some space_. Nolan was going to go to the gym anyway, so it wasn’t like he was retreating from the room or anything.

He was just keeping the plans he’d already made. Like, maybe a little early. Whatever. It was fine.

He had his headphones on, deep into leg day, when he stood up from a deadlift to Travis right in his fucking personal bubble.

“I can’t hear you,” he said. Travis’s mouth was moving but Nolan had Young Thug turned up too loud to hear him, and he was not really interested in whatever bullshit Travis was spitting.

Travis rolled his eyes and bounced on his toes. Nolan ignored him and finished the rest of his set, then grudgingly turned his music down in time to tune into, “…was wondering how you knew how to wash hockey pads because you didn’t fuck them up at all and so I googled you and _holy fucking shit_, man.”

“I’m trying to work out,” Nolan said. He dropped his hex bar and headed for the squat rack—if Travis was going to be here, he might as well spot him.

“Don’t you like,” Travis said, pulling a plate off one end of the bar. “Have anything to say?”

“I hate talking during workouts.”

Travis jammed on a heavier plate. “But like—_dude_. So like. I’m sorry for trying to get you to come join the club. That must have been shitty when you can’t play anymore.”

“I can play,” Nolan muttered, stepping under the bar and settling it on the top of his shoulders.

Travis’s eyes went all wide and hopeful in the mirror behind him.

“I just don’t want to fuck with this weak-ass bullshit.”

Now Travis looked hurt and Nolan felt like he’d kicked a puppy. Which was dumb as hell, since he’d had no problem getting all up in Travis’s face like, thirty minutes ago.

They finished the set in silence, then switched places because apparently Travis was working out now, too.

He was stronger than he looked. And he had good form, at least after Nolan fixed a few things.

“Tighten up your fucking core,” he ordered.

Travis made a bitchy face, but he tightened his core, so. Nolan won.

Or maybe he lost, because now he had a workout buddy who ran his mouth the whole fucking time.

Nolan went to a national park for the weekend, and Travis went to whatever passed as training camp for a club hockey team in the South.

The national park thing was cool, and Nolan’s shoulder didn’t act up at all even after dragging a backpack up and down mountains twelve miles a day. The Blue Ridge Mountains were all beautiful and shit, way different than anything in Manitoba, and there was this moment on Saturday when they climbed out of the trees and onto an open granite peak and it was like the whole world was opening up around him: ripples of blue and green as far as he could see, in and out of the shadows from the clouds.

“Holy fucking shit,” he said.

One of the hippie girls—Ryanne or Rihanna or something like that—grinned up at him. “Pretty rad, right?”

“Rad as fuck,” Nolan agreed. He’d seen mountains before—not just Winnipeg’s garbage mountain, either—but this was like, a place where he was going to _be_. Not just visit for a long weekend with his family, or see out of a bus window on the way to the Kelowna Rockets’ rink.

They all took a bunch of pictures with the club banner, and then hiked back down the mountain to a campsite by a swimming hole. That was awesome, too, splashing around in the ice-cold water and playing a messy game of chicken fight. Ryanne was light enough that he could barely feel her weight on his shoulders, but it turned out she was a total badass anyway, and they won the _shit_ out of the inaugural Outdoors Club chicken tournament.

Nolan felt like he was winning something else, later, when they made a campfire and toasted marshmallows and someone pulled a fucking ukulele out of their backpack: it was an awesome day, and nobody knew who the fuck he was or said one single goddamned word about the sport of ice hockey. (Ryanne had made an _ouch_ face when she saw the red scars on his shoulder, and the older white line that started inside his right hipbone and continued down under the waistband of his swim trunks, but that was it. One little ouch face. Nobody gave a fuck, and his body was absolutely good enough for everything he asked it to do.)

He smoked weed for the first time, because why the fuck not? He didn’t need to worry about like, lung capacity or whatever.

“I needed this,” he said, voice drifting up towards the underside of the tree canopy like the sparks from the campfire.

Ryanne made a grabby hand for the joint. “That’s mine, Nolan.”

Nolan was lying on his back, looking up at the stars, and she had her head on his stomach. He was maybe running his fingers through her hair, because the texture was fascinating, and he guessed this was what being high felt like: as if his brain was twenty thousand miles away from his problems, like everything he’d ever worried about was an insignificant little thing trapped under the arc of the tree branches while his mind was drifting through the sky.

Ryanne swung up to sit across his hips, exhaled a breath of smoke into his mouth. “You wanna,” she asked, and it was clear what she was asking.

“Not really,” Nolan said, propping an arm under his head. “Sorry. You’re stupid hot and I like you. I just don’t really, like. Do girls. Anymore.” He usually didn’t tell people that; had never told anyone that, actually, not in words, but what the fuck did it matter? And wasn’t that the point of this whole fucking thing—to do things differently?

“Damn,” she said, sitting back on her hands with the joint in her mouth. “You’re stupid hot, too.”

“I could introduce you to my roommate,” he offered. “He’s just stupid, though. Not hot.”

That was hilarious to both of them, and they collapsed into a pile of giggles until one of the upperclassmen came to take the joint away and pack them into Nolan’s two-person tent. They fell asleep on top of their sleeping bags, Ryanne’s golden head on his shoulder, and who gave a shit if everyone thought they were fucking?

Nolan came back from the national park with his first college friend. Because his dumbass roommate that he saw every day and worked out with like five days a week and who he ended up getting breakfast with like, more days than not because (except for Thursdays) they always had their first class at the same time, and who never. Fucking. Stopped. Talking.—yeah. Travis did not count.

Travis made a noise of physical pain the first time he saw Ryanne, like a small animal getting stepped on. But slowly, so it had time to really let the world know it was suffering.

“_Dude_,” he said. Then, “_Bro_.”

“We’re just friends.”

“Then you are the _dumbest_ motherfucker I ever met in my entire life.”

She was coming towards them across the quad, blonde curls swirling over one shoulder and her backpack dangling off the other. Nolan was not like, a connoisseur of girls’ hotness or whatever, but even he could see she was a smoke show.

“So is this your stupid-not-hot roommate?” she asked, laughing.

Nolan had to give Travis credit—he shook it off pretty quickly, and was back to his normal motor-mouth self before they’d gotten more than halfway back down the quad.

The ice hockey team had their first party that weekend. Travis asked if he wanted to come, but Nolan was not trying to fuck with that: he’d been drinking beer in basements with hockey dudes as long as he’d been drinking beer, basically.

And it made something hurt in his chest, or maybe it was a reminder of the tearing, ripping ache in his shoulder: things he assumed he’d always have that it turned out he didn’t get to keep, after all.

So instead he waved Travis off to meet his new buddy Carter (another freshman on the hockey team who played goalie and seemed suspiciously not batshit insane), and went to pick Ryanne up at her room instead. Her older cousin had a house off-campus, and she was also having a party—it was some kind of welcome-back block party situation, actually, over in the neighborhood where all the upperclassmen lived and all the frat houses clustered.

Ryanne looked pretty as hell, in a tiny little white lace dress. Kind of the opposite of the last weekend’s cutoff jeans and Patagonia tank top, but whatever, girl was working it and he told her so.

Her roommate made a choked-off noise before Ryanne elbowed her, and the three of them set off into the night.

Ryanne’s cousin’s place was fine—there was a keg of Natty Lite in the kitchen, and a massive Rubbermaid tub of gin punch that you sucked out of turkey basters. Ryanne shoved the turkey baster in his mouth and told him to suck, which was somehow hilarious to every frat-lord crammed into the kitchen. There were an equal amount of sorority girls shrieking about the fall semiformal.

Nolan already knew he hated gin, and it turned out he still didn’t like frat guys.

“I hate gin,” he told Ryanne. “And fuck these dudes.”

She rolled her eyes. The two of them were sitting on the front steps of the house, drinking beer and making fun of the country music blasting out of the living room. Ryanne’s roommate was thrilled, though, since she was planning to rush in the spring. “This party kind of sucks.”

They took a stupid selfie, Nolan doing his best frat-guy mean mug and Ryanne going all vapid and dumb-looking.

Meanwhile FT was blowing up Nolan’s SnapChat, probably unintentionally. It looked like the beer was better at the hockey house, though, and they had jungle juice Travis swore didn’t contain gin. Just “grain liquor.”

“Do you want to go over to where my dumbass roommate’s hanging out,” he asked.

“He’s not that bad,” Ryanne said. “He’s kind of cute, I think. Like a hyper puppy that’s still learning social norms.”

Nolan gagged. “He straight sucks, babe.”

“You would hang out with him less if you actually thought that,” she said, and he didn’t really have a great comeback for that one.

So they left Ryanne’s stupid party to go to Travis’s stupid party, abandoning her roommate to the Greek letter mafia.

The street was crowded with drunk college students, stumbling and whooping along to Chance the Rapper. A lot of the houses had front porches with people sitting out on top of their roofs, throwing beer cans at people and heckling.

It was everything Nolan had hoped for, in a very different way than smoking up with Ryanne in a national park the weekend before.

“College, baby!” she yelled. Some random dudes cheered along with her, adding a _fresh meat_ chant, but they shut up quick when they got a good look at Nolan looming behind her.

A wolf whistle split through the noise and Nolan would totally fight someone, but it just turned out to be Fucking Travis. He was posted up on a lawn chair—like, an actual _lawn chair_—on the hockey house’s porch roof. The porch looked like it was leaning sideways into the brick house, and did not look up to any building code, anywhere. Travis had found a snapback somewhere so he looked even more like an urban redneck than he usually did, which was saying something since Nolan rarely saw him wear t-shirts that still had the sleeves attached.

“Get up here, assholes!” Travis yelled, kind of teetering forward until Carter caught his arm.

“No,” Nolan said, just to be contrary.

Travis found them out on the back porch with the jungle juice, because Nolan needed something stronger than beer if he was going to do the hockey bros-thing all night. Travis had the chill of like, the Sahara, so every single one of these fucking dudes probably knew his backstory and he just—could not get into that shit sober. Or drunk, probably, but he knew which option he’d prefer.

“You have to come meet my boys,” was all Travis said, though, and he must not have run his mouth after all: nobody asked him a single thing about hockey, other than small talk about the NHL because Travis said he was Canadian. And sure, Nolan hadn’t wanted to bullshit about the Jets and Alex Ovechkin every day of his life, which was why he’d come here—but he could handle it in limited doses, he thought.

A dark-haired guy Nolan would peg as a d-man introduced himself to Nolan and Ryanne, but mostly Ryanne, as Ghost Bear. That was definitely not the name on his birth certificate, and Nolan did not come to this party to learn anybody’s fucking hockey handle. “No, really,” Nolan said. “Like, what is your name.”

“Uh, Shayne, I guess,” he answered, like Nolan was the weird one. “So Travis says you do a lot of like, hiking?” Again, mostly to Ryanne.

“Love to hike, buddy,” Nolan said, cheersing their solo cups together hard enough that Uh, Shayne spilled his all over his hand. Ryanne just leaned on his shoulder laughing, because she loved to troll a dumbass just as much as it turned out Nolan did.

“Hockey players are assholes,” he told her. “Never date one.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” She had to stand on her tiptoes to yell in his ear.

“I’ve been one, babe,” he said before he thought about it.

“Oh, right, because you’re Canadian.”

It was nice, he thought, how little emotional investment anyone down here had in hockey. Like _real_ hockey, not whatever JV bullshit these assholes were on: up in the Peg, or anywhere else Nolan had ever been in Canada, if you got this many hockey players together _someone_ would have known who he was. He wasn’t like, that famous or anything, but he was supposed to go first in the draft and the ‘Dub was big news on the prairies.

He collared Travis and stole his stupid green snapback. “Who went first in the draft?”

“Umm, Myles Garrett to the Browns? I feel bad for that poor fucker.”

Nolan rested his case, until Ryanne told him it was sexist that he hadn’t asked _her_ who went first in the draft, and Travis nodded seriously and said Nolan hated women so she should probably pick a better option. Which was hilarious in its own way, especially because he just did not understand why that made the two of them crack up the way it did.

“Buddy, I really don’t get it?” he said after Ryanne slipped off to brave the bathroom, his face all scrunched up in confusion. He had very bad hat hair. Like, the worst, and also he was growing some dumb looking goatee like an asshole.

“There’s nothing to get.”

“Whatever.” He perked right back up. “Hey, wanna go back out on the roof?”

Ryanne was talking to Captain Resting Bitchface while she was waiting in line for the bathroom. “Sure, whatever.”

The night air was a lot cooler after the smash of body heat inside, even with the residual heat radiating up from the shingles on the porch roof. Travis very seriously explained that was the reason they had lawn chairs—because they were _ice_ hockey players and they liked to be _cool_—but Nolan didn’t give a fuck. He lay down on his back, looking up at the underside of the night sky. There was too much light pollution to see the stars, and the music was pounding loud enough downstairs that he could feel the bass buzzing up through his shoulder blades.

Travis grumbled, because he was physically incapable of not making noise, but finally shoved the other lawn chair out of the way and lay down next to Nolan. He opened his mouth and took a breath, like he was going to start talking.

“Shut up, Fucking Travis,” Nolan told him. They were close enough that he could feel the heat off Travis’s skin, a ghosting suggestion of his arm hair when he fidgeted. Nolan felt a ripple of goosebumps go up his arm, for absolutely no reason at all.

“_You_ shut up,” Travis parried, then waited a beat. “Hey, just so you know: people don’t usually hate me.”

Nolan shut his eyes, and told Fucking Travis that he didn’t hate him.

“Babe, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.” Travis thumped a hand down on his heart. “Thanks for coming tonight.” He rolled onto his side, head propped up on his hand. Nolan didn’t want to look at the sharp angles of his face, all hazy from the night and the jungle juice. “I know you don’t want to like, do hockey shit or whatever. But this is nice.”

“Thanks for not telling everybody about. You know.” Nolan closed his eyes again, because it was like it didn’t count if they were shut.

“Of course not, bud. I’ve never been that good at anything,” Travis said, with a note in his voice that sounded kind of like honesty. “I don’t know what it would be like to have to give that up.”

“It sucked,” Nolan said. He thought the rest went without saying: he’d wanted a clean break, he’d wanted to go somewhere that he wouldn’t have to hear about hockey every goddamned day of his life.

Travis must get it, because he said, “And then you get stuck with me.”

“Ugh, right.”

“Sorry,” Travis said. He flopped himself back down onto the roof tiles, then pushed himself up almost immediately and hung his legs over the edge of the roof. He wouldn’t break anything if he fell off, probably, not that Nolan cared. “But I gotta say, I feel like you being here is gonna be good for my game, dude. Your workouts are _nasty_. So like, thanks for that.”

“I’m so glad,” Nolan said, “that eighteen years of my life and getting all my dreams crushed is gonna help you and your B-squad hockey team.”

“Buddy.” Travis grinned over his shoulder, just as bright and shiny as one of the streetlamps in front of them. “What if I pretend that every time you insult me, it’s actually a compliment? What do you think that would do for our relationship? Maybe the RA would stop cornering me and asking if I felt like, physically threatened by you.”

“What, because you’re so fucking innocent?” Nolan asked in disbelief.

“It’s cause you’re a goon. Anybody can see it.”

“Just ‘cause I was in the ‘Dub doesn’t mean I’m a goon.” The coaches had given him a babysitter-slash-enforcer his last year. Fuck that, Nolan could handle his own shit. “What, are you? Do you fight nuns in the Pennsylvania Catholic league?”

“No nuns but I’ve definitely fought,” Travis sighed, which was not surprising. Nolan didn’t see how anyone could look at his goddamned face without wanting to punch it, and he said so.

“There you go again,” Travis grinned, hand over his heart again. “Babe, you say the sweetest things.”

“What the fuck is going on here?” Captain Resting Bitchface asked from the window, sounding even pissier than usual.

Ryanne poked her head out of the window next to him. “Nols, Claude is gonna walk me home, okay? One of my bookshelves is all wobbly and he’s gonna try to fix it.”

Claude gave Nolan a straight-up smirk as they both vanished back into the house. Travis made a _woof_ noise as Nolan clicked his teeth shut on the statement that _you know I could fix your bookshelf, right_. Because Ryanne had given him a death glare, like she could sense his threatened masculinity raising its head.

“I hate to say this, buddy,” Travis said once they were gone, and Nolan didn’t believe him at all, because he sounded pleased as a goddamned Southern peach, “but I think you missed your shot.”

“I didn’t miss my shot,” Nolan fired back. He’d been in on an empty netter. He just hadn’t—wanted to shoot. Or whatever. He’d fucked enough girls in Juniors to know he wasn’t interested.

“Kinky,” Travis said, dubious.

“Fuck you, dude.” He whacked at Travis’s hip; Travis smacked back; and they were kind of grappling around, Travis mostly in a headlock, when Carter’s sweet little face appeared in the window. Nolan wanted to hate him the way he hated anything associated with hockey at this dumbass school, but he was so fucking cute and pure. Like a pet.

“I uh,” he said, “was gonna head back? Teeks, you wanna come with?”

“Sure, Hartsy,” Travis said, mostly into Nolan’s armpit. “No man left behind. They said that in orientation, right? Use the buddy system? Except for Nolan ‘cause G sniped his _buddy_.” He paused. “Wait, weren’t you supposed to have _two_ buddies? Ryanne and her roommate? Dude, you suck at saving girls from stranger danger.”

Nolan tightened his grip until Travis was making wheezy little noises.

They got their shit together and bought a TV once they recovered from their hangovers on Sunday, and Travis’s mom shipped down his Xbox. (They still didn’t have a fridge or a microwave, which was pathetic, but whatever. They both had meal plans. And Nolan Amazon-ed himself a coffee pot, and tried not to yell at Travis when he took the last cup every goddamned day.)

So it was inevitable that one day in early October, Nolan came back to the room after a shift at the gym—because he might as well get paid to swipe IDs and re-rack weights at college, too—to Travis giving a guilty kind of jump on his bed and doing a lightning channel change.

“Were you watching porn, what the fuck,” Nolan said. It had been kind of a long shift and he still had to finish a lab report for his bio class. He didn’t super-mind giving Travis time to play some one-man couch hockey but the library was just—pretty far away. And he was tired, damn it. A whole frat had descended on the weight room and left shit absolutely everywhere, like their trust funds would disappear if they put a single dumbbell back on the rack; and he’d been working with his most hyper coworker, Mitch, who made Travis look chill. He was decent to work with, but being around him just made Nolan—exhausted.

“No,” Travis said, eyes all shifty and looking exactly like a dude who had just gotten caught watching porn. Except that his basketball shorts were on and he didn’t seem to be rocking a stiffie.

“Dude, I don’t give a shit. Just tell me if I need to leave.”

“No-o,” Travis repeated, slowly. “It’s just, um, yeah, I don’t really wanna—”

“Jesus, what are you into, anyway? Cake crush? Tentacles? That Japanese newscaster shit?”

“Shut up,” Travis said, looking appalled. “What the fuck kind of porn do you have in Canada? I don’t even know what that shit is.”

Nolan’s second-to-last road roommate had been one weird dude, what could he say. (He’d still somehow managed to get himself drafted by the Kings.) (In like, the sixth round.) (Not that Nolan cared.)

“Never mind,” Nolan said.

Travis’s traumatized expression wasn’t getting better. “Oh my god, is this why you let G snipe Ryanne? Was she not down for your weird kinky Canadian sex?”

Nolan collapsed onto his bed and hid his eyes under his arm. “I don’t have weird kinky Canadian sex.” He didn’t have any sex, actually, since he wasn’t doing the whole girl thing and he had no idea where one went to pick up a dude. Okay, he did spend a lot of time in the gym, and he was pretty sure Hyper Mitch was gay (if the rainbow flag pin on his polo shirt was anything to go by), but like, he _worked_ there, so. That did not spark joy.

“Whatever you’re into is okay,” Travis finally pronounced, seeming like he really had to think about it. “As long as you get like, affirmative consent. And like, probably a safe word, ‘cause I dunno, that seems like it would be a good idea if you’re planning to get weird.”

“Travis,” Nolan said into the underside of his wrist. “Have you had sex?”

There was another long pause. “Mostly?” was what he went with.

“Great. I’d love to hear some tips after you’ve actually gotten your dick wet.” 

“_It’s been wet_,” Travis hissed, which, no, that was not a thing Nolan ever needed to picture. Even if Travis did have kind of killer fuck-me lines and was developing actual abs now that he was doing real workouts. Not that Nolan should be noticing dumb shit like that. Or feel his stupid cheeks blushing about it. “Just not like, _in_ a girl. All the way.”

Nolan took his arm off his eyes. He needed to see Travis’s face for this. “Buddy. My dude. Don’t tell me—just the tip?”

“How did we get from your weird Canadian porn to you _mocking me_. I just meant I’ve gotten a _blowjob_. Like, plenty of blowjobs,” Travis moaned. He pitched himself back on the bed and pulled a pillow over his face. “I was watching the Caps game, Jesus. I don’t even like the Caps! I just couldn’t get the Flyers anywhere. And it’s hockey season,” he said, pathetic and muffled, like Nolan didn’t know that in his bones and in his stitched-together Frankenstein shoulder.

So that was kind of weirdly sweet, actually. “It’s fine,” Nolan finally said. “Watch your stupid game.“

He put on his headphones and stared at his lab report on his laptop and only made a few comments about the Caps and their bullshit penalty kill. (And because Travis was being such a baby about his precious Flyers, he also explained how to illegally stream all the out-of-network games. Because that was the kind of thing you learned in the ‘Dub, alongside how to slay at Mario Kart.)

Shortly after that, Travis’s own season started, and Nolan started never seeing him. He had practice two nights a week, and was usually on the road at least one night a weekend, if not the whole time—Big Red had just moved up a classification and they were playing in the ACC’s most competitive club tier.

That also meant they were getting their asses beat.

Like, every game.

Nolan didn’t give a fuck, except that it made Travis all twitchy and pissed-off. He banged his weights around in their morning workouts and bitched about the other two teams they shared ice time with and the hole in the center of their second line.

But not like, in a way where he expected Nolan to do anything about it, except kick his ass in the gym. And Nolan was happy enough to do that—it was weirdly gratifying to see Travis start to fill out through the shoulders, hear him talk about how he wasn’t getting knocked around as much anymore out on the ice.

It was late October when Ryanne slipped into the dining hall booth across from him. She and Claude were dating, somehow, which made Nolan’s head hurt. Worst of all, she was getting into hockey: he’d caught her yelling at a Flyer with Travis the last time the three of them had hung out. So there went Nolan’s hockey-free sanctuary.

“They’ve got a home game on Halloween,” she said over her slice of pizza.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. It’s against Tech.”

Nolan made a face that was meant to indicate how little he gave a shit that the Big Red were hosting their closest competitors at the bottom of the league. He was eating a chicken breast, salad, and brown rice: it sucked exactly as much as it sounded like, but he’d tried to do the whole fuck-it-I-only-eat -pizza thing the year before, and it had only made him break out and get super-bloated. Ryanne could apparently eat as much pizza as she wanted, the little bitch.

“Don’t we have that backpacking trip?” he asked. The Outdoors Club was going out for one last camping hurrah before it got colder, and school got nastier.

“Yeah but we don’t leave until Saturday morning, duh. And it’s _Halloween_ and it’s a _Friday_.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with going to a hockey game.”

“We’re dressing up, loser,” she informed him. “I don’t know why you act like you hate hockey so much. You can’t lie to me: I know you watch with Travis.”

“If I wanted to go to hockey games, I would have stayed in fucking Canada,” he pointed out. Which was 100% true and also, approximately 1/4 of the truth. “And I’m not dressing up.”

“Oh, honey,” she said pityingly. “It’s cute that you think you have a choice about this.”

“I hate you,” he told her when she showed up at his room the day of the Tech game. Travis had cleared out a few hours ago, running late after some group project meeting and scrambling to get all his shit packed into his gear bag.

She was wearing a cheerleading outfit. Like, a real one, even if it said _Cary High School Imps_ in red across the front, not _Go Big Red_.

“Shut up,” she told him, shoving a bag into his arms.

“You were a cheerleader,” he said, experimentally. This did not jive with his little hippie pot-smoking Ryanne. “Like, a real one.”

“Shut up,” she repeated. “I had my cousin get you pumpkin beer as a bribe.”

Nolan shut up. He did love a pumpkin beer, which Ryanne said was the gayest thing about him. Nolan really didn’t know what that had to do with being gay or whatever, even if he was not-straight more in theory than in practice at this point.

His mouth did not stay shut, even after a pumpkin beer and a half, when she produced his Halloween costume. Because it involved little white short-shorts and a red top with an absurdly—like, _absurdly_—deep V. And two pom-poms.

“Congratulations, I might be scared straight.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s _funny_. God.”

“Claude’s gonna flip his shit,” Nolan told her. Claude was all territorial and jealous about their friendship, but was _just barely_ not enough of a bag of dicks to actually try to do anything about it. They were also going to freeze their asses off—clearly Ryanne didn’t know shit about being a hockey fan.

Trolling Claude was the only thing that got Nolan into the shorts. He didn’t have _quite_ the glutes he’d had in the ‘Dub, but eighteen years of hockey ass didn’t go away overnight, either.

Ryanne was kind of—staring at him.

“Holy shit,” she said, finally.

“God, _what_,” he snapped, draining his beer and grabbing another. His cheeks were on fire, he could tell.

“I had no idea you were so jacked,” she said.

“I work out _all the time_.”

“Yeah, but the only clothes you wear are hoodies and basketball shorts. I thought you like, had something to hide.”

“You’ve seen me with my shirt off,” he pointed out. “Like, the first time we ever hung out. And I was so hot you tried to fall onto my dick.”

“I thought I must have hallucinated,” she said. “Because your abs can’t actually be that good.”

“Well,” he waved a hand at them, “I guess they are.” He paused, smirked, and added, “Better than Claude’s?”

Their Uber driver kind of—stared at Nolan for a second, while they climbed into the back of his Hyundai. Nolan waved his pom-poms at him. “Happy Halloween, eh?”

“Oh my god you just sounded so Canadian,” Ryanne wheezed, falling into his side.

“’Cause I’m Canadian, babe,” he reminded her, intensifying his death-glare into the rearview mirror and wrapping an arm around Ryanne’s shoulders. He dared—he literally dared—this fucker to say something. A one-star review would be the least of his problems.

The Skate Zone was in a strip mall behind a movie theatre, way out in the ‘burbs. It was pretty different from the rinks Nolan was used to from growing up, but then he figured skating rinks in the US had to diversify in a way that Winnipeg’s did not—it had laser tag and a bank of arcade games, including a Halo shooter that Ryanne had to drag him away from.

But as soon as they pushed through the glass doors to the rink, it was the same: a shock of cold, the smell of ice and bodies, recirculated over and over. Championship banners hanging from the ceiling, from juniors teams and the local figure skating club and the three college clubs who used it as home ice.

There was decent attendance, he guessed. A few parents, but it was mostly half-drunk college kids, plenty of them in costumes. He vaguely recognized a few people from the hockey party and Travis’s Instagram.

And there was a whole little section in mismatched red and white cheerleading outfits.

Nolan was the only guy, though, which he realized as Ryanne grabbed his hand and dragged him over. “Hi, bitches!” she trilled, and yes, holy shit, this was in fact a WAG (well, only Gs at this point; maybe a fiancée at the most) group costume.

So, that was great.

Ryanne introduced him around to general whoops of laughter and cheers of excitement. One of the older girlfriends had a flask of Fireball in her purse, which went a long way towards improving his outlook: his stomach was twisting somewhere around his knees, not just from all the pumpkin beer. This was the first time he’d been in a rink since he’d quit, the closest he’d come to stepping out onto the ice: and he couldn’t deny that his body had wanted to head straight for the gate onto the rink, take that first gliding step across the pristine surface of the ice. It was muscle memory, or something.

But instead he was here, mostly drunk and wearing a male cheerleader costume with all the girlfriends. It was a nightmare scenario for Nolan Patrick, presumptive high first round pick: Nico Hischier tearing it up for the Devils, versus a washed-up gay guy who hadn’t been tough enough to make it.

He felt like a joke. He felt like throwing up, as the PA system crackled to life and the skaters came out onto the ice for warmups.

He hunched into his seat on the bleachers, curling around the Fireball. All the girls were up cheering, shaking their pompoms.

Ryanne dragged him to his feet, not noticing or not caring that he was freaking out. “Pick me up,” she demanded. “I was a flier in high school.”

“A what?”

“One of the ones that does all the flips.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He was pretty wobbly.

“Coward!”

“Fuck you,” he told her, and she smirked in victory before climbing up his back like a little monkey to settle herself on his shoulders.

Nolan didn’t know who looked more surprised when he saw them: Captain Resting Bitchface or Travis.

Probably Travis, because he skated right into Uh, Shayne’s back and had to drop to the ice for pushups. Claude just looked annoyed, but then Claude always looked annoyed, so, whatever.

A couple of the Tech guys skated up to bang on the glass, whistling and blowing kisses. Nolan gave them all his best glare, which just made them laugh harder.

“Whose are you, princess?” one of them hollered. He had a C on his shoulder.

“Ow!” Ryanne slapped his hand, where he was maybe digging his fingers into her thigh a little hard. “Ignore them, babe. They’re just jealous.”

“Yeah fucking right,” he growled. He had a backpack with a hoodie, because he wasn’t an idiot (he brought one of Travis’s for Ryanne, because she was totally going to get cold), but he felt like covering up was almost—cowardly. Didn’t he keep telling himself he wanted things to be different? And then doing basically everything the same, except that he wasn’t skating?

Well, this was definitely different.

He stole a pom-pom from the girlfriend next to him—he couldn’t get at his own with Ryanne on his shoulders—and gave it a shake. “Go Big Red!” he called in a fake-excited voice, and blew the asshole in the C a kiss.

Ryanne smacked him in the head. “Don’t be ironic.”

“You’re the one that put me in a cheerleader costume and dragged me to a hockey game,” he said. “I’ll be however the fuck I want.”

The game itself was…bad. It had been a minute—several minutes, maybe even a few hours—since Nolan had watched non-elite hockey. Someone would fall down every other play, or lose an edge, or telegraph a pass so blatantly you could see it from space.

Travis wasn’t terrible, to Nolan’s surprise. He was fast and confident on his skates, and he had decent hands. Claude was also not terrible, unfortunately—he put the Big Red up with a wrister from a tough angle at the end of the first.

Unfortunately it didn’t last, because their goalie was garbage. Like, a stinking pile of garbage; from the bench, Carter was staring very carefully at absolutely nothing. And none of their centers seemed to have heard the phrase “back-check.” Or “two-way.” Or even just the general concept of “defense.”

“Come on!” he yelled. “Rag it, you fucking idiots!” just before one of the wingers had a completely unnecessary turnover in the neutral zone that gift-wrapped Tech a breakaway.

By the end of the second, Nolan was drunk enough that it was personal. Every time some goon in an orange sweater with—was that actually a turkey on it? What the actual fuck?—knocked a Big Red player off the puck, it got worse.

He was wrapping up a rant about their failures in neutral zone coverage when he realized that the whole WAG section was staring at him.

“I thought you hated hockey,” Ryanne said, after a minute.

Nolan dropped back into his seat. When had he stood up? He didn’t remember. “I told you I played.”

“But that’s like, very specific feedback. I don’t even know half of those words.”

“This is my cultural heritage,” he reminded her. “You started caring about hockey three weeks ago.”

Travis scored two in two minutes to start the third, evening up the score—one off a rebound from the guy on his left wing, then firing a shot top shelf on a breakaway for the second.

And things got chippy. Someone caught Shayne in the nose with an elbow, and he had to skate over to the bench, head tilted back to keep blood from dripping down onto the ice.

He couldn’t hear much of the trash-talking, but he assumed it was happening, because it was a hockey game. Travis seemed to be running his mouth constantly, not like that was a surprise; but what was a surprise was when he dropped his gloves and absolutely went to town on the Tech captain, face all twisted up in anger.

In that moment, it _killed_ Nolan to be sitting in the stands. He wanted to be out there on the ice, with a bolt of pure longing that left him short of breath. He could fix the issues through their center. He could yell at them about back-checking, loud enough that they’d listen. And he was big enough that any of these dickheads would think twice about trying to start something, not that Travis seemed to be having any trouble beating that guy’s face in, even though he probably had an extra thirty pounds on him. Travis looked kind of—scary, actually, not that Nolan was scared of him or anything; just that all of the intensity he usually brought to annoying Nolan was getting channeled into reducing the Tech C to a smear on the ice.

“I don’t think they’re supposed to fight,” the girlfriend sitting on his other side said.

And sure enough, the refs were dragging them apart, shoving Travis off the ice and back down the hall towards the locker rooms. There wasn’t even a tunnel—just a break between the bleachers, so that Travis had to clomp back down the hall in his skates, looking fucking murderous. The Tech guy must have landed at least one punch, because Travis’s lip was split and dripping blood down onto his sweater, red on red.

“Excuse me, sorry,” Nolan said, not particularly sorry as he stuck the Fireball in the waistband of his shorts and shoved down the row of bleachers.

There wasn’t anything to keep him from walking into the home locker room, so he did. He found Travis ripping at his sock tape, helmet bobbling in the middle of the floor like he’d thrown it.

“Badass, bud,” Nolan told him, pulling out the flask and giving it a little shake.

Travis accepted it with a scowl, and took a long pull. He started spluttering halfway through it. “Fuck, what _is_ this shit?”

“Fireball,” Nolan said, dropping onto the bench next to him and wishing he’d grabbed a hoodie out of his bag. Out in the bleachers with the WAGs, the costume was clearly a costume, but in the familiar space of the locker room he felt a little—exposed. Which was dumb; he’d been half-dressed in hockey locker rooms as long as he’d been alive.

He watched Travis finish getting himself un-taped, then unlace his skates and kick them off, before he leaned his head back against the partition of his stall with a low-voiced _fuck_.

“I’m gonna get suspended,” he said to the ceiling. “We’re not supposed to fight.”

“So I hear.” Nolan shrugged. “He probably deserved it, though.”

“That piece of shit _definitely_ deserved it,” Travis spat. “The shit he was saying—Jesus. Like, clearly _this_ is a joke. It’s not like you’re _serious_ or whatever.” He gestured at Nolan’s outfit. “And you could break that fucker in half with one hand, anyway. Even in those shorts.”

“Probably skate circles around him, too.”

“_Obviously_.” Travis shook his head as he pulled his sweater off, using it to dab at his lip. “Ow!”

“Not so tough now?” Nolan asked him, going to grab a handful of paper towels. He ran water over one, then brought it back to Travis’s stall. “Stop it. Quit wiggling, you fucking live wire.”

He dabbed at the blood on his lip, gently. Travis made a face but sat still until his lip was clean. Nolan’s fingers looked very pale against the golden tan of his skin, where he was holding him in place; and it was all in his head, of course it was, but there was this weird little crackle of electricity when his fingertips moved against Travis’s skin, when Travis licked his lips when Nolan was done.

They lost the game, and Travis got suspended. He took it well, if “took it well” meant finishing the flask of Fireball before the end of the period, passing out on Nolan’s shoulder in the back of Claude’s stupid American-sized SUV, and then rallying like a champion once they got back to the hockey house. If by “rallying like a champion” you meant throwing up his guts and re-opening the cut on his lip.

“You’re such a fuckup,” Nolan told him. He was sitting on the tile floor on the other side of the bathroom, trying not to wonder too hard about the last time Claude had tried to make the freshmen clean it as some kind of weak-ass hazing ritual.

“I don’t like Fireball,” Travis said pathetically. He was holding the toilet like it was his one true love. It looked like the scene of a murder, with blood dripping down his face and splashed along the sides of the toilet.

“Fireball doesn’t like you either, bud.”

“Leave me to die,” he moaned. “Nolan, buddy, save yourself. This ship is going _down_.”

After Travis was done puking, and Nolan had scrubbed out his lip again and stolen a few bottles of Gatorade from the fridge and a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer, they ended up in the backyard. It was a little chilly, finally; cold enough that Nolan pulled his hoodie out of his backpack. One of the upperclassmen had a fire going, which was probably a terrible idea but whatever.

Nolan was taking a break from caring.

The same lawn chairs that had been out on the roof were scattered haphazardly around the fire, and Travis dropped into one of them heavily enough to make the metal frame creak. Nolan dragged one over to sit next to him. Their knees bumped as he sat down, Travis in track pants and Nolan’s still bare, because he was somehow still dressed like a male cheerleader.

Travis was being quiet for once. Maybe because he was on the verge of passing out; but Nolan looked over, and his eyes were open, a liquid kind of dark in the night. He was holding the icepack to his lip while he watched the fire twist and pop, sending sparks up into the sky (and possibly the overhanging limbs of a tree that was hanging way, way too low for the president of the Outdoors Club to endorse building a campfire fire under it).

“Cold?” Nolan asked. “I’ve got another hoodie.”

“Sure, yeah.” Travis inspected it. “Isn’t this mine?”

“I took it for Ryanne. Thought it would fit her nicely.”

“Fuck you, dude.” There was no heat to it, though. “But seriously, thanks for like, being my babysitter tonight.”

“You’re the worst baby ever.”

“Don’t tell me you’re into that adult baby porn shit, too?”

Nolan snorted, tried to smother a smile but couldn’t quite keep it down.

“There it is,” Travis crowed, kicking him in the ankle. “A Nolan Patrick smile! You make me work so goddamned hard for ‘em, bud.”

Nolan shut his eyes, feeling the warmth of the fire on his face. “Gotta keep you honest.”

Travis yawned loudly, and his chair creaked like he was leaning back again. The party was in full swing inside, bass rattling the windows and people doing shots out on the back porch, but it felt like they were in their own little world. “Fuck. Don’t know what I’m gonna do tomorrow,” he mumbled up at the sky. “Thought I’d be driving down to fucking North Carolina with the team.”

“Fucking buses,” Nolan said. If there was one thing he didn’t miss about the ‘Dub, it was the hours and hours on a bus. Sure, it was fun sometimes, fucking around on Nintendo or just talking, long and spooled-out conversations on the Trans-Canadian Highway between Brandon and Saskatoon; but mostly it had felt like he was counting down until he got to board an NHL team’s jet.

He’d get back on that bus in a second, though.

But he didn’t want to think about that.

“Hey,” he said, opening his eyes and tilting his head to look at Travis. He looked like he’d fallen halfway asleep while Nolan was thinking, mouth open and bag of peas slipping out of his hand. “Wake up, shithead.” 

Travis made a sleepy noise and shook his head. “No thanks, bro. I’m done.”

“Come camping with Ryanne and me,” Nolan said, not sure why, exactly, he was volunteering to spend more time with Fucking Travis. “Unless you’re too soft, city boy.”

“Fuck you, I love camping,” Travis said around another yawn. “My aunt and uncle have a farm outside of State College—I go up there every summer.”

“What the fuck kind of a town is named State College,” Nolan said, more to be a dick than because he didn’t actually know.

“Fuck you, _Winnipeg_. I’m so good at camping. I’m the best at camping.”

He wasn’t. Well, Travis wasn’t objectively _bad_ at camping. He made it into the van in the morning, and only gagged into the plastic bag Nolan brought him like, twice. He didn’t bitch on their hike into their campsite; he helped stake out their tent like someone who had pitched a tent before.

Once his hangover finished wearing off, he was just—himself.

“Nolan,” he said. “Buddy. Will you look at that _creek_.”

“Where,” Nolan deadpanned. He was filling up the reservoir for the water filter in the creek Travis was apparently worried he hadn’t seen.

“I bet it’s got some great fishing.”

“Bet it does, bud.”

“I wish I had my pole.” He was practically bouncing on his toes, all decked out in in honest-to-god Carhartts and an oversized plaid shirt. And Nolan’s favorite snapback, for some reason, or for the exact reason that he was a piece of shit. He was wearing running shoes, though, like the dumbass he was. “Did I tell you about that thirty-pound catfish I caught last summer?”

“No,” Nolan said, which was a lie. “Thirty pounds?” but of course that didn’t stop Travis from telling him the whole story again.

Nolan shoved the reservoir at him, hard enough that he made a little _oof_ when it hit his stomach. He was still on catfish when Nolan was done getting the gravity filter set up, and had moved onto bass by the time the filter was done running.

“I hate you,” Nolan told him.

“Remember when I said that every time you insulted me, it meant you loved me? So like, I still believe that, bud.” He grinned, which made his eyes scrunch up in a way that Nolan should not ever, ever think was cute. “Anyway, best fishing in the world is in the good ol’ US of A.”

“Fuck you. Do you even have a passport?”

Travis patted his plaid, right over his heart. “Aw, buddy. There you go, getting me right in the feels.”

“Am I interrupting something,” Ryanne asked, holding up her empty Nalgene.

“No,” said Nolan, at the same time Travis said, “_Yeah_ you are.”

They went on another hike in the afternoon, Travis managing to maintain a steady stream of chatter for five straight miles. Nobody else seemed to mind, playing along and laughing at his bad jokes. (Okay, a few of them were funny.) (If you had bad taste in jokes.) (It turned out that Nolan had worse taste in jokes than he thought.)

“You should bring him more often,” one of the outdoors girls told him. “We could use him as a generator.”

“So much for the peace and quiet.”

“For sure,” Ryanne drawled from behind him. “Because he annoys you so much that you specifically invited him so he wouldn’t sit around alone and sad all weekend.”

He waved a middle finger in her general direction. Travis bounced up onto his tiptoes and spun around to wave at Nolan from up the trail, still grinning like he was having the best day of his life.

But when they made it to the summit of the mountain, even Fucking Travis shut up for a second. Everything around them was colored in fire, shades of red and gold and orange with the occasional green dot of a pine. No houses, no roads, nothing but the peaks and angles of the mountains as far as they could see.

“Holy shit,” Travis said, because of course he was going to say something.

“Holy shit, bud,” Nolan agreed.

Travis wanted a picture for his ‘gram and dragged Nolan into it. When Travis showed him the best one, it looked—good or whatever, leaning into each other’s shoulders with Travis grinning like an absolute asshole in Nolan’s snapback and Nolan looking more like the person he’d been before his entire life went to hell.

“Text it to me,” he told Travis.

“Aww buddy,” Travis crowed, “are you finally gonna get an Instagram? Is it gonna be your profile pic? Are we totally the best?”

“I was gonna send it to my mom,” Nolan admitted before he thought about it, then to salvage what was left of his pride he added, “also, I clearly had an Insta. I just deleted it or whatever.”

Travis threw an arm around his shoulders—well, more like his upper arms—and squeezed, already distracted again. “Bro, look at this shit. We _are_ that wholesome content.”

“Tell that to Claude’s bathroom,” Nolan fired back.

Nolan had a two-man tent and usually he shared with Ryanne. But when he asked why she was putting her stuff in another tent, she’d laughed at him and told him to have fun with his fuck-buddy. So, there they were.

Travis’s wild night had caught up with him while everybody else was still around the campfire, and for whatever reason Nolan found himself agreeing to head to bed, too. It was cold, and getting colder; but nothing that some layers and a sleeping bag wouldn’t handle. It was refreshing after the oppressive drag of the southern heat, which made Travis laugh at him and call him _such a Canadian motherfucker oh my god_ but literally whatever, it wasn’t like Travis said he was _wrong_. And it wasn’t like Pennsylvania was so fucking temperate over the winter, at least from what Nolan had bothered to learn about American geography.

“I was promised pot, bud,” Travis told him once they were both in their sleeping bags.

“Fuck you, go get it yourself then.”

“It’s okay.” Travis gave a massive yawn, turning over on his side to look at Nolan. It was dark in the tent, with only the barest suggestion of light catching at the angles of Travis’s face. Nolan hadn’t realized how close they were, really. It wasn’t like Travis was a big dude, but he still took up a hell of a lot more space than Ryanne. Nolan could smell him, too—wood smoke and clean sweat overlaying whatever body wash he usually used.

They slept eight feet away from each other, in the same room, every night. Nolan didn’t know why this felt different all of a sudden. He’d been sharing rooms and tents and hell, even beds (in a very no-homo way) with other guys his entire life, even after his little _realization_. For fuck’s sake, the only people he’d ever fucked and then fallen asleep with were girls.

So there was no reason on the fucking planet that he should be thinking about how close he was to Travis. How little space he’d need to cross, if he wanted to tip his head forward and—whatever.

“Hey,” Travis said, wriggling an arm out from his sleeping bag to poke Nolan in the shoulder. “Where’d you go on me, buddy?”

“Just thinking.”

“You were straight up staring into my eyes, dude,” Travis snickered. “See something you like?”

“Fuck off,” Nolan told him, whacking Travis’s arm out of the way. “Go the fuck to sleep, if you’re so fucking tired.”

They didn’t, though. Instead they stayed awake—or halfway awake, anyway, in the kind of low-voiced, quiet place where it was possible to shrug off all the bullshit and be real; and also where the littlest thing seemed stupidly funny, like one of Nolan’s stories about the pranks they pulled in the ‘Dub.

“Shh, shh,” he hissed, trying to smack a hand down to smother Travis’s laughter. “People are trying to sleep, you asshole.”

“But—the bus driver—”

Nolan managed to slap a hand over Travis’s stupidly loud mouth. Travis licked his palm, and that was somehow the funniest fucking thing—Nolan laughing set Travis off, and neither of them were managing to be particularly quiet, and the president of the Outdoors club yelled at them to _shut the hell up, you idiots_.

They fell asleep eventually. Nolan didn’t know how late, or how many members of the club hated him by the time they’d finally piped down. He thought Travis might have trailed off mid-story, rolled over on his side so they were face to face, voice gone all low and blurry with sleep; either way Nolan hadn’t been far behind.

Travis was definitely the first one up, though, since Nolan woke to him hissing “_Nolan, buddy_,” and poking him in the shoulder.

He opened his eyes. Travis was like, right in his face, so close that he could feel the puff of his breath. It was quiet, and cold, and still dark as hell outside.

“What the fuck do you want.”

“Buddy. We’ve gotta go on a sunrise hike.” Travis was clearly wide awake.

Nolan was not. “No.”

They went on the sunrise hike, stumbling back up the trail with headlamps and their breath frosting out in the cold morning air. It was cold outside the tent, really cold, and it smelled like fall: decaying leaves and that first touch of the winter. Travis hadn’t brought a warm enough coat (because he wasn’t actually that great at camping) so he’d unzipped his sleeping bag all the way around and was wearing it like a cape.

Nolan wasn’t mad about the sleeping bag, though, when they made it back up to the mountaintop. It was windy out of the trees, and the air had an edge to it, sharper in the ambiguous blue light of the pre-dawn. Travis dropped down onto the rock, leaning his back up against a scraggly lone pine, and flapped the sleeping bag at Nolan.

“Get in here,” he said, so they huddled inside it and waited for the sun to creep over the horizon. It was warm with their body heat inside the sleeping bag, and Travis was sitting still for once, a living weight up against his shoulder.

This wasn’t what Nolan thought his life would be. But it wasn’t so bad, either, watching the long golden fingers of the sun light up all the colors in the leaves. The only thing moving anywhere in sight was a wedge of southbound geese, nothing more than dark silhouettes against the red backlight of the sun.

“This is awesome,” Travis said, quietly, in a tone of voice Nolan had never heard him use before.

He turned his head to look down, and Travis was smiling out at the mountains. His hair was greasy and overdue for a cut, a cowlick flattened down from sleep and Nolan’s snapback; and his face was even scruffier than usual, after two days without shaving. But fuck if Nolan didn’t feel some kind of weird rush of like—fucking _fondness_ or some bullshit like that.

“Yeah,” Nolan agreed.

“Fucking cold, though.”

“You’re fucking weak, bud.” But Nolan wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in. He would have done it for anyone, he told himself, not thinking about the way Travis fit under his arm, or the way his head angled into the space beside his neck. Not thinking about it at all.

Three days later, he still wasn’t thinking about it. And it wasn’t like it was a _problem_—he didn’t actually want to bone his little hyper rink rat roommate, Jesus fucking Christ—but yeah. He should probably take some steps, or something.

“I need to get laid,” he told Ryanne, which was maybe a step. They were studying, or anyway they were sitting in the full-on Harry Potter library with their laptops and textbooks, so it was not like, inconceivable that they might study at some point. Even if so far Ryanne had mostly been bitching about her roommate, and Nolan had been watching some Stars highlights. (Not because he cared.) (But like, his uncle would probably give him shit if he’d missed something the next time they talked.)

She flicked a balled-up piece of scrap paper at him. “Missed your shot, babe.”

“Ugh, I don’t want to think about that.”

“What about that guy you work with? What’s his name—Mitch?”

“Not a chance.”

She _hmmed_, then pulled her laptop over and began tapping away at it. Nolan thought she might actually be doing work. Which was a good thing—Nolan thought Travis didn’t do enough work, but Ryanne _really_ didn’t do enough work, and he didn’t want to have to find new people to hang out with. Because that would be annoying.

But no, she spun it around to face him and instead of her problem set for Fundamentals of Financial Accounting, it was the event page of the campus LGBTQ center.

“Look!” she said, waving a game-show-host hand at the schedule. “So many chances for you to get laid.”

Nolan scanned the list. “I don’t think a drag brunch is really my scene,” he said doubtfully.

“I don’t care, it’s _my_ scene,” she announced.

The drag brunch was not his scene.

It turned out that Ryanne was right about it being _her_ scene, though, because she made friends with absolutely _everyone_; was pronounced _fabulous_ by at least four separate very tall men in very shiny dresses; and procured two invitations to the after-party that night.

Nolan kind of—lurked in the background, getting accidentally mimosa-drunk and trying to avoid being given a lap dance. He did not see Mitch anywhere, which was probably a good sign for Mitch’s preferences in hobbies.

“You are the worst gay best friend,” Ryanne bitched while they were pre-gaming the after-party. Travis and Claude had a tournament so she’d brought all of her shit over to Nolan’s, and was spreading makeup and girl-things everywhere. “You’d rather be watching some dumbass hockey game, wouldn’t you.”

Nolan was definitely not watching a hockey game on his phone. (It wasn’t like he cared or anything—the Canadiens were just losing to _Ottawa_, kind of epically, and he loved to see a sad Hab.) “Uh, no.”

“Let me at least put some eyeliner on you,” she begged.

“I’ll fight you,” he told her, in perfect honesty. The cheerleader thing had been—enough.

“Glitter?”

“What the fuck do _you_ think?”

“You just look so—_straight_.” She sounded desperate.

Nolan was wearing a gray sweater and his tightest pair of jeans, which he thought was already an upgrade from a t-shirt and basketball shorts. “This is what I look like, babe.”

“_Ugh_. Let me do _one thing_,” and she launched herself at him like a little blonde ninja with a spray-can of—something.

“What the fuck is that, babe,” he asked while she was shaking it through his hair.

“Dry shampoo, you fucking greaseball.”

Nolan inspected himself in the mirror on the back of Travis’s closet door. “Huh.”

“I know, you washed it like, last week, and that’s good enough for your dumb ass.”

“No. It’s like, bouncy,” he said, running a suspicious hand through his flow, which was looking fresh as hell all of a sudden. “What the fuck is that? Witchcraft?”

Dry shampoo was the only product he let near him, though. (And he secretly took a picture of the bottle when she wasn’t looking. If he was gay enough to go to a drag brunch after-party to try and get his dick sucked, he was gay enough for one hair product.)

The center of the Venn diagram between a Queer Community Center after-party and a hockey house party included alcohol, drunk college students, and nothing else that Nolan could see. Everyone was very glittery and alternative, and the music was club jams and Carly Rae Jepson, and Nolan was, in fact, out of place in a sweater.

Ryanne was in the middle of the dance floor living her best life, and he was propping up a wall with a very fruity drink that was going to give him a monster headache in the morning.

He sucked at this. He’d never had to figure out how to have a social life, outside of a team, because it had just always fucking _been there_. He missed the fucking bus, and he missed shooting pool with his weird-ass second-to-last road roommate, and he missed wasting hours of his life fighting to get an Xbox to connect to whatever shitty hotel wifi in whatever shitty corner of the Western Hockey League. Red Deer. Medicine Hat. Kootenay.

“Fuck me,” he muttered into his drink.

“Is that an offer?” asked an arch voice to his left.

“Um,” said Nolan, intelligently.

“Don’t tell me,” the guy said, resolving himself into—well. He wasn’t bad looking, actually: shorter than Nolan, trim but athletic-looking, big blue eyes and intentionally messy brown curls. “You came with a girl.”

“Um, yeah. She’s over—there.” He could see a blonde head flashing through the multi-colored lights on the dance floor. Whitney Houston was wailing that she wanted to dance with somebody, and Nolan didn’t want to dance with Ryanne, or this guy, or anyone else, but—yeah.

Maybe they could do something else instead.

So Nolan had his first college hookup. His first hookup with a guy, really, unless you counted a couple of mutual jerk sessions from juniors, which he definitely did not.

It was hot, sure, pressing the guy—Max—down and feeling the hard lines of his body; kissing him and rubbing against his stubble, burying his face in his lap and smelling the musk of male arousal.

It was hotter than anything he’d ever done with a girl.

He just didn’t think it would end with the same off-balance ache, a kind of vague disconnection that left him shrugging off Max’s offer to crash for the night. He walked back to the dorm, alone, at three o’clock in the morning: everything was dark and quiet, even the noise from the late-night parties at the frat houses winding down, and he might as well have been the only person in the world.

Nolan was still sleeping it off when Travis got home from his tournament.

“Fuck, it smells like Captain Morgan threw up in here,” Travis announced from the doorway. “Need a Gatorade, buddy? Re-do on whatever the fuck you did last night?”

“I need you to shut up and turn off the lights,” Nolan said. He wasn’t that hungover, not really; he was just in a fucking horrible mood and he felt slightly too bad to go to the gym and work it off.

“Sorry.” The overhead light snapped off, and he could hear Travis moving around—dropping his gear bag, throwing shit at (certainly not into, because he was a goddamned pig) his laundry hamper. He left but then came right back, sneaking up to the side of Nolan’s bed.

“Jesus, what,” he asked, with his eyes closed.

“I brought you a Gatorade and some Advil.”

Nolan hated him, but he was a good Canadian boy, so he opened his eyes halfway and thanked him. Travis smiled down at him. He looked pretty tired too, actually, with dark circles around his eyes and his tan a little gray.

“Guess neither of us are our best selves today.”

“Guess not.” Nolan heaved himself upright and cracked open the Gatorade. Travis had gotten him a yellow one, which was his favorite. “What’s your excuse?”

“The NC State boys had a party.” Travis shrugged. “Hey, want to go for a run? I feel like I need to sweat this shit out.”

Travis kept up with him pretty well, which Nolan told himself was because he was hungover, not because Nolan was in such bad cardio shape. He was quiet as they climbed the steep hill that headed out of campus, dragging themselves up Fraternity Row and into the residential neighborhood behind it. People were out raking leaves, playing with their kids and their dogs, and the air was crisp and cold.

They were about a mile in, and Nolan was thinking about how he needed to up his cardio game and not at all about how he was such a fucking failure in every single way possible: as an athlete, as a, whatever, a gay man who should be living his best fucking life and instead couldn’t get out of his own way to enjoy an objectively hot hookup. And also he had a calc test on Tuesday that he should have already been studying for.

“So I fucked a girl,” Travis said while they were waiting at an intersection. He was staring at the no-walk sign like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen in his life.

“Congratulations?” Nolan offered.

Travis made a face, which, okay. “I dunno, bud. It’s like…”

The walk light switched on, and they started running again. Between breaths, Travis told him about his high school girlfriend, how they’d dated for three years and he’d always thought she’d be his first; but they’d broken up senior year when he didn’t want to go to BC or Notre Dame, and told her that he was kind of over Catholicism, anyway.

“So it was weird,” he said, finally. “Doing that with someone I didn’t care about at all. I mean, she was nice. Pretty. But it’s not like I got her number or anything. It’s just—not what I thought my first time would be like.”

That was such a Twilight Zone parallel that Nolan admitted he’d never hooked up with anyone he gave a shit about at all, actually, eyes on the pavement disappearing under his running shoes. He didn’t want to see whatever expression was on Travis’s face; and he shouldn’t care, anyway.

And then three strides later Travis tripped on an uneven spot in the sidewalk, swore fluently and creatively in front of a group of innocent kids playing in a leaf pile, and caught himself on Nolan’s shoulder. He was heavy, and close enough that Nolan could smell the post-alcoholic tang of his sweat.

Nolan thought, _Fuck_.

A few days later, Nolan was at the swipe desk at the gym, counting down the minutes until he could leave. He had a lab report due for bio, and he’d promised to help Travis with a problem set for his accounting fundamentals class. (Because unlike Ryanne, he could shove Travis into his desk chair and not let him leave their room until his homework was done.) (They’d just gotten used to each other, and he didn’t want to have to get a new roommate in January if Travis flunked out.) (It was whatever.)

So it was just perfect when he looked up and saw Max, standing there with his ID in his hand.

“Hey,” Nolan said, and swiped his ID, because he was a professional.

“Thanks.” Max looked around; seemed to decide something. “So, uh. How’s your day going?”

He shrugged. “Fine. Lot of homework.”

“I haven’t seen you here before.”

“I don’t usually work on Tuesdays.” They were making conversation, apparently. At least Max was still hot in the light of day, and he’d been nice. Easy. It wasn’t his fault Nolan was kind of a fuckup in terms of their whole situation.

They kept talking for a while, Nolan swiping someone in occasionally. Just basic conversational shit. It wasn’t like, _the best_, but he thought they were both trying, and he wasn’t that surprised when Max asked for his number.

Nolan’s life should have been pretty great after that, and in a lot of ways, it was. He harassed Travis into passing all his midterms, and Travis dragged him to various parties in various hockey players’ apartments. He made fun of Travis’s shitty facial hair and ever-growing collection of trashy snapbacks; Travis made fun of him for deciding to major in _fucking gym, bro are you even serious_. Not that he bitched about his gains or the numbers he was putting up out on the ice.

And in the background, he and Max—whatever. Hung out. They weren’t dating; he knew Max was fucking other people, because Max told him so. (And Max was certainly not fucking _him_. Maybe it was some soft bullshit, but Nolan’s ass was not getting involved with a guy who was fucking other dudes.)

Ryanne was pretty skeptical of the whole Max setup, but whatever. It was like training wheels for when he gave a shit, except instead of learning how to ride a bike he was learning how to deep throat. 

Everything had a nice, neat little box, and if Travis started a failing campaign to steal his phone and figure out who he was texting, whatever. He was never actually going to guess Nolan’s passcode.

And even if he did, so fucking what? They’d run into Mitch from the gym a few times, rainbow flags and all, and Travis had never said anything about it.

It wasn’t like Nolan wasn’t willing to be—out, or whatever, or that he thought he’d lie if Travis asked him to his face. It was just that no one ever seemed to look at him and go, _yeah that dude is into other dudes_. And he didn’t see why he needed to go out of his way to make it a big deal—to sit Travis down and be like, _excuse me, roommate, let’s talk about where I put my dick_.

“I think he’d want to know,” Ryanne said. It was late and they were in the library again.

“Why the fuck would Travis want to know.”

She tapped her pen on her textbook. “Just a feeling,” she said, resting her chin on her other hand. “He’s lowkey obsessed with you, babe.”

“He’s not obsessed with me,” Nolan said, and immediately got like, ten snaps in a row from Travis. The team was driving back from a tournament in Northern Virginia and traffic did not appear to be in their favor, if the lines of red taillights Travis was taking pictures of were anything to go by.

A few days later, he was telling Travis everything he was doing wrong with his clean-and-jerks, and Travis was yelling at him to shut up and let him concentrate while managing to make three times as much noise as the person he allegedly wanted to be quiet.

So, it was a normal day in the weight room.

Until Nolan looked up from Travis’s shitty second pull to see Max heading towards him. He hadn’t seen him in the gym more than once since they’d started hooking up somewhat regularly, and Nolan had no excuse for the squirm of panic he felt when he saw him. He wasn’t ashamed, or whatever bullshit like that. He wasn’t.

“Hey, Nolan,” Max said, leaning in for a sideways bro-hug.

“Hey.”

Travis dropped his bar, narrowly avoiding Nolan’s foot. “Hi?”

God, he looked like a mess, in a ratty Benedictine t-shirt with holes around the collar and a snapback that was shitty even by his extremely low standards. Max, on the other hand, was perfectly turned out in like, Lululemon or whatever the fuck.

Nolan had social skills, no matter what his sister Madison said, so he introduced the two of them as “my roommate Travis” and “this is, uh, Max.” It’s not like they had a label; it’s not like Nolan _wanted_ them to put a label on it. What the fuck was he supposed to say, _this is Max, my gay sex training wheels_?

Usually Travis would have been off and running after an introduction, but instead he was looking at Max with a squinty-eyed intensity Nolan hadn’t seen before. It was kind of trippy to see them standing in the same visual field, and with them side by side Nolan had to acknowledge that there were certain—visual similarities. Similar build, similar hair, except that Max was objectively like, way hotter. And it’s not like the world had a shortage of 5’10 dudes with brown hair—they were only an endangered species in professional sports.

“So how do you two know each other?” he asked.

“Oh, around,” Max answered airily. “Look, just wanted to say hi. I’ll let y’all get back to your workout.”

“_Oh, around_,” Travis muttered once he was on the other side of the room. “What the fuck is this, a fucking tea party?”

“Wouldn’t know, bro. We don’t go to a lot of tea parties in Winnipeg.”

Travis picked the bar back up and finished his interrupted set. He snapped back at Nolan’s form corrections, with a bite in his voice that Nolan hadn’t heard since their first week on campus, and a tense kind of quiet was stretching between them by the time they were headed back to the dorm.

“Okay, what the fuck,” Nolan said, when Travis was still being a little bitch twenty-four full hours later. “Why are you being such a shithead.”

“I’m not being a shithead,” Travis said.

“Can confirm, you are being a shithead. Bud. Like, you get that I hang out with people at school other than you, right.”

“Ryanne doesn’t count.”

“Other than Ryanne.”

“You did not meet that guy with the Outdoors Club.”

“I do other things,” Nolan pointed out. “I have a job. I go to class.”

“Then why are you being so weird about it?”

“_I’m_ being weird about it,” he echoed, just to like, check for confirmation. “I say hi to like, one person that you don’t know, and you get all bitchy at me.”

“Whatever,” Travis growled, shoving shit into his gear bag. “I have to get to practice.”

“Great.”

“_Fantastic_, buddy.” He slung the strap of his bag over his shoulder and stormed out, and Nolan was exactly 0% clearer on what the fuck had just happened than when he’d started the conversation.

He texted Ryanne, _boys are weird idk why TK is mad at me all of a sudden_.

She sent back the shrug emoji and a minute later, _remember when I said he was obsessed with you?_

Nolan did his homework, because he was a responsible person, and ventured out into their hall’s common room for some Halo. After the beer pong expedition at the beginning of the semester, he hadn’t spent that much time with the other guys on their hall, he realized; his social life had somehow turned into Travis and Ryanne and hockey parties and hiking and a 100-day snap streak with Madison and, whatever, Max’s apartment.

It was like all the rest of the guys had a shared language of in-jokes and parties at frat houses, and he—did not speak it.

“You going to the pig roast at Kappa this weekend?” one of the Yateses asked him.

“No,” he answered.

“Oh, so you’re hitting the National downtown? There’s a sick EDM DJ coming through.”

“No.”

And that was basically their conversation. But whatever, he was better than all of them at Halo so it wasn’t like they were ever going to complain when he popped up to join a party. He put on a clinic in mowing down the Banished, and one of the future frat lords said “Wow, your reflexes are like, crazy good,” and Nolan wanted to respond with _I used to be an elite player in the fastest sport in the world_ but he didn’t. Because it was over.

He was in a pretty terrible mood by the time Travis got back from practice. The guys on the hall sucked. Ryanne sucked, because she was doing her homework for once and unavailable to entertain him. His sisters sucked, because he tried to FaceTime them and they both declined his calls because they were quote busy unquote. He didn’t feel quite pathetic enough to call his mom. And what the fuck was he going to say? _My roommate that I’m supposed to hate is mad at me?_

Hard pass.

“Sorry I was being a shithead,” Travis announced all at once, dropping his bag on his bed before Nolan had time to open his mouth.

“Yeah.”

He made a face. “I know you can have friends I don’t know about. I just, I dunno, I was surprised ‘cause I thought we kind of knew everything about each other since we’ve been here, you know? But obviously that’s not true. And it’s fine. I know you’re like, a private person, or whatever.”

Nolan suppressed a wince, specifically not hearing Ryanne’s voice in his ear saying _I think he’d want to know, babe_. “It’s okay. I just know Max from like—around. That’s all. We’re not like, tight.”

“Shit, so you’re secretly texting someone _else_?”

“I’m not secretly texting anyone.”

“Ugh, so you finally met a girl who was into your fucked-up sex shit?”

“_No_.” Nolan did not know how or why this was still a running joke.

“_Fine_,” Travis said, back to sounding a little snippy.

He turned to rummage around for something in his gear bag, and Nolan admitted to his back, “I’d tell you if there was someone that mattered, okay?”

Travis’s shoulders paused, then shrugged. He said, “Yeah, okay,” and that was the end of it; except that Nolan was left with an off-balance kind of feeling, like he’d missed the play and was a step behind everyone else on the ice.

He was back to normal in the morning, though, whining at Nolan from under his blanket until he made coffee, bitching about his accounting study group when they went for a run.

“Hartsy’s got a date,” Travis said when they were in the dining hall for lunch, surrounded by the hum of voices and the rattle of cutlery on plastic plates.

“Good for Carter.” Nolan inspected the piece of broccoli on the end of his fork, trying to decide whether he wanted to put it in his mouth or not. The salad bar was extra sad today. Travis coped by smothering everything in ranch dressing; Nolan was still trying to figure out which of the salad dressings had the right ratio of “hiding the wilted vegetables” to “not tasting like the worst parts of America.”

“They’re going to this holiday light thing, at one of the city gardens.”

“Nice.” Ryanne had said something about that, he thought—called it Instagram bait and said she didn’t want to go, in a way where it was clear that she did, in fact, want to go, but she wanted someone else to make it happen so she could keep pretending she was too cool.

“He got a couple of extra tickets.”

“Yeah?” Maybe he’d do his good deed for the year and pass that tip along to Captain Claude, because some how, some way he had a contact for Resting Ginger Bitchface in his phone now. He bit down on the broccoli on his fork, which did not have a good mouth feel, and so maybe he was too preoccupied by the soggy vegetable to fully listen to Travis’s long-winded anecdote.

“…so Hartsy’s girl’s roommate was gonna come with us, but it turns out she’s got an exam the next morning, and like, I don’t want to be fully a third wheel but I do actually want to go. So like, do you want the extra ticket? It's supposed to be legitimately cool.”

“Huh?” Maybe he should have been listening.

Travis rolled his eyes and crunched on a carrot. “Do you want,” he said, mouth open to display a mangled mix of carrot and ranch, “to come. To the thing.”

“Um, whatever,” Nolan said, which Travis apparently took to mean _yes_.

Carter’s prospective girlfriend did not look thrilled when the three of them rolled up in the shitty Honda he’d borrowed from one of the older guys on the team. Which, Nolan was not an expert in girls, but, word: the front bumper was duct-taped on and the floor of the backseat was full of actual trash. Trash that he got to put his feet in, since the girl got the shotgun seat and he and Travis were relegated to the back.

“You’re such a fucking neat freak,” Travis told him, kicking a balled-up McDonald’s wrapper at his knee.

“I live in enough garbage in our fucking room, I don’t need to ride around the city in it, too,” he snapped, whipping an empty takeout cup at Travis’s head.

Carter gave them a tense smile in the rearview mirror and turned up the radio. It was playing Christmas music, some sugary pop singer sighing away about the meaning of the season. Travis had replaced his snapback with a Santa hat for the occasion, and Nolan had acquired enough bourbon to float travel mugs full of spiked hot cider via Ryanne’s cousin’s alcohol-purchasing service.

“I thought Americans didn’t celebrate Christmas until after Incorrect Thanksgiving,” he said.

“Only the lame ones,” Travis said, flicking the pompom on his Santa hat.

“I like, love Christmas,” said the girl. She was wearing a green elf hat and tiny little red mittens. Carter dialed up the level of sweetness in his smile; apparently he was digging the mittens. Or her face, or whatever, which meant that he made them disappear into the crowd ASAP after their arrival at the garden. Which was—and Nolan hated admitting this—extremely seasonal and probably romantic and shit, so he could understand why Carter wanted to enjoy it with his cute little elf girl instead of Nolan and Travis.

“I can’t believe Hartsy abandoned us.”

“You’re so fucking clueless, buddy.”

“It was supposed to be a double date,” Travis whined. “Now I’ve just got—you.”

“_You_ asked _me_. And also, I’m a great date,” said Nolan, who had been on three dates in his entire life. They had all been terrible, but that was because he’d still been trying to convince himself he wanted to do girls. Not because he was like, bad at dating. He would be great at dating, if he ever wanted to try. “I even got you alcohol.”

“I guess this is fine,” he sighed, like he was so massively put-upon, as if the guy wearing the Santa hat in November wasn’t happy about the like, fucking winter wonderland fairy light path through the woods they were strolling down, while drinking tasty hot drinks that Nolan had exerted a certain level of effort to acquire. He’d taken the bus to the grocery store and bought like, multiple ingredients, and if it wasn’t _exactly_ how his mom made hers (and it maybe tasted very faintly of coffee since the coffee pot was the only thing he’d had to make it in), it was close enough for Fucking Travis. “You’re not Hartsy’s girl’s rocket roommate, though.”

“Fuck you, dude,” Nolan shot back automatically. Maybe Travis was bad at dating. But hadn’t he had a girlfriend for like, three years? Shouldn’t he be less shitty at it?

“I wanted a rocket and I got stuck with a beauty,” Travis bitched to his travel mug.

“Shut up, this is the worst date I’ve ever been on,” Nolan lied, and hip-checked him into a sparkly bush.

Travis settled down after that, and it was, like, objectively a nice night. It was cold enough to fit the lights and the hot cider, and the moonlight lined everything in silver. There were a lot of people, obviously—they even spotted Carter and his elf a few times—but occasionally they’d hit a pocket of space where it was just them, and the glitter of the lights.

They ended up on the far side of a pond, watching the reflection of the lights on the water. There was a lit path along the far side, so probably they were in the wrong place or something, but Nolan didn’t care: it was quiet and peaceful, sitting by themselves and listening to the distant sounds of laughter from the crowd.

Well, Nolan was sitting. Travis was hopping around on a rock pathway leading out over the water, trying to get his angles right for some Insta pic.

“You’re going to fall in,” Nolan told him, shifting himself to sit cross-legged on the dead grass. This time two years ago, he hadn’t been able to do that—he’d been playing hurt and playing hurt, winning some hardware then going under the knife for what, the fourth time? Fifth? Was it bad that he couldn’t remember, that they all blurred together in a string of hospital smells and the days-long fog of anesthesia dragging at his brain?

By his last year in Brandon he’d forgotten what it felt like to _not_ be in pain. Now it didn’t hurt at all, not even the ghost of an ache.

“Stop looking so serious,” Travis called from the farthest rock.

“Just thinking.”

“You’re gonna hurt yourself, bud,” Travis said, skipping his way back to the bank. He collapsed next to Nolan on the grass, elbows and knees; slanted him a crooked smile, one of the ones that made his left cheek go all uneven and crinkled. Nolan could only halfway see it in the dark, but he knew it was there.

He knew _Travis_, he realized. Knew he was a spazz with jealousy issues, knew he needed someone to keep after him in the gym or he got lazy, knew his terrible table manners and all his opinions about the Philadelphia Flyers. Also knew that he was solid where it mattered.

So Nolan told him, “This isn’t what I thought I’d be doing,” eyes on the lights out on the water.

“What, being my fake Christmas date, or…” Travis trailed off, like he was letting his brain catch up with his mouth for once. “Oh.”

“Like, college, sure. Whatever, if I wasn’t good enough to go straight up to the show.” But he had been, and he hadn’t been, all at once. “Just not like—this.”

Travis thought for a minute, pulling up his knees to rest his chin on them. Then he tilted his head to look up at Nolan sideways, Santa hat trailing over his shoulder as their ankles brushed together. “I know it’s probably not—I dunno. A fair trade, or whatever. But I’m, I don’t know. Glad. That you’re here.”

Nolan didn’t have anything to say in response to that, not really, so all they did was keep watching the water. Travis talked, because he couldn’t help himself, but Nolan didn’t mind: his voice had a steady kind of rhythm, and it was. Whatever. A nice night, with the water and the lights and the heat of the bourbon in his stomach.

Carter texted Travis after a while, telling them to come meet him and the elf back in the parking lot. They were both faded by then, leaning on each other in order to stay mostly vertical, and it took them longer to get themselves un-lost than it should have. At one point they stumbled into these giant green hedge things, which Travis said were called boxwoods with a drunken authority that no eighteen year old should have about types of shrubbery; but they were dope as hell, this stand of giant plants with hollowed-out insides twined with ropes of white LED lights.

There was enough room for both of them to stand inside, like a secret. Nolan watched Travis stare up at the lights with a dopey smile on his face, turning himself in a slow circle to take it all in. He shot Nolan a bright, uncomplicated grin when he’d completed his rotation, and Nolan was feeling some kind of thing, maybe, because of the bourbon or the lights or the fact that even though it wasn’t a date, it was the best date he’d ever been on.

And that made him sad and weirdly kind of—hopeful, some complicated tangle of feelings that he didn’t want to think about. So he thumped Travis on the arm, instead. “Come on, loser. Let’s go.”

Travis was giggly and friendly in the car, leaning on Nolan’s shoulder and halfway squashing him against the window so he could poke his head into the front seat. He was warm, and heavy, and his Santa hat was stupidly soft when it brushed against Nolan’s cheek.

He was still wearing the hat under the yellow fluorescent lights of their hall’s bathroom, shirtless in his boxers while he brushed his teeth. Nolan could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Travis without a hat on, probably, but the Santa shit was taking it to a new level, and he told him so.

“Shut up, I love Christmas.”

Nolan spat toothpaste into the sink. “_You_ shut up. It’s still November.”

“Fuck you. My mom and my brother won’t let anyone celebrate the fucking spirit of Christmas until after Thanksgiving, and this is my first goddamned year of freedom. Don’t harsh my flow, dude.”

“What if you’re harshing my November flow,” Nolan said, which didn’t make sense, but whatever. They were drunk, and Travis was meeting his eyes in the bathroom mirror with a challenging smirk.

“You’re Canadian, buddy. You don’t _have_ a November flow. Your fake-ass Thanksgiving flow is all in October.”

“It’s not fake,” Nolan shot back, even though his family had never given a shit about Canadian Thanksgiving. But now Travis was disrespecting his country, or something.

“You poor moose-loving dumbass. You don’t even know what you’re missing.”

“I thought the point of this conversation was how you’re ignoring Thanksgiving to celebrate Christmas early.”

“I’m not ‘ignoring Thanksgiving,’” Travis said, sarcastic air quotes ruined by how he was still holding his toothbrush in one hand. “I’m just extending the Christmas joy, bud. Get some.”

“No,” said Nolan.

“Oh my god, you _would_ hate Christmas.” Travis spat into the sink and pulled out his floss, because he was a slob in every single way possible except for his like, fucking oral hygiene or whatever. And his pads—he’d let Nolan show him how to wash them and bought a proper drying rack, so now their room didn’t reek like a locker room 24/7. Which was something, okay.

“I don’t hate Christmas,” Nolan said, because Travis’s mouth was too full of dental floss and fingers for him to respond. “I hate fake ‘tis the season bullshit.”

Travis responded with something that may have been _it’s not fake if you mean it_ but might also have been Yeti noises. He mumbled something else around his fingers, quirking his eyebrow at Nolan like he was waiting for an answer. When none was forthcoming he kicked him in the ankle.

“What. I can’t understand you, dickhead.”

Travis rolled his eyes extravagantly and threw his floss in the trash. “I _asked_, what are you even _doing_ for the Thanksgiving break, anyway.”

“Uhm, nothing,” said Nolan, who hadn’t thought about it.

“Bud, you cannot stay here and try to go to class in like, the most BS protest ever.”

“I can work.”

“I think even the gym is closed.”

Nolan made a face. “Fuck America.”

“I know,” and Travis’s face lit with like, unholy glee, “come to PA! You can have a cultural experience. Come on, Nolan, it would be so dope.”

“No,” said Nolan, but somehow he knew he’d end up going, anyway.

“So you’re ‘going to Thanksgiving with Travis,’” Ryanne said, deploying air quotes much more successfully than Travis had. They were in the library again; she wasn’t studying but Nolan was, or at least he was trying to, when she wasn’t talking. “Like, meeting the family. That’s cute.”

“What the fuck else was I going to do,” Nolan asked. “Sit here by myself like a loser? And I already met his family at move-in day, duh.”

“You could have come home with me. Or, I don’t know, maybe gone to see your own family or some shit.”

“The break’s not that long.” He’d checked, okay, before he’d accepted Travis’s invite—but the flights were brutal, Mads was playing in a tournament the whole time, and his parents had seemed happy enough that he had a friend. And it wasn’t like either of them gave a shit about Bullshit Thanksgiving. “And Claude would actually kill me if I went home with you.”

Ryanne inspected the ends of her hair. “Oh, Claude’s harmless.”

“To you, maybe,” he muttered. Not that he was afraid of Captain Resting Bitchface or anything.

“No, really. He’s like, actually sweet.”

“Sweet,” Nolan repeated.

“_Whatever_,” she announced, flipping her hair in a gesture Nolan recognized from life with his bratty sisters. “How does your other boyfriend feel about this?”

“Who?”

“The one you actually put out for.”

“Uhm,” said Nolan. “I don’t know, it hasn’t come up.” He and Max didn’t like, _talk_. And he hadn’t been all that into answering Max’s texts, recently. He’d started getting that off-balance disconnected feeling afterward, again; or maybe he’d finally admitted that it had never gone away in the first place.

“Of course it hasn’t,” Ryanne muttered at her textbook, followed by something insulting that Nolan didn’t bother listening to. He had a bio lab to finish, okay, and she wasn’t helping. He stuck in his headphones, turned up The Shins, and ignored her. If she wanted to fail out of school, that was her jam.

Travis peer-pressured him into skipping classes on Wednesday—which wasn’t really a thing Nolan did; he didn’t _love going to class_ or whatever bullshit Travis accused him of, he just still had a (real) hockey player’s preference for a structured routine—so they took the train up to Philly on Tuesday night. It was late when they pulled into the 30th Street Station, Travis trying to point out a bunch of crap Nolan couldn’t really see in the dark.

“Don’t worry, we didn’t go past any of the really cool shit,” Travis assured him. “You’ll get your pic on the Rocky steps.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Anyway, Mom should be at the station by the time we get there,” Travis continued, tapping away at his phone until it buzzed, and then he stopped, locked it, and put it in his pocket. “So, uh. Turns out a few of the boys wanted to get together at the rink tomorrow.” He was shooting Nolan some kind of big-eyed look from under his toque, since it was apparently now toque season instead of snapback season. (Even if Travis called them beanies, because he was American, and wrong about things.)

“Do your thing, I don’t give a fuck.”

“I’m not going to _leave_ you,” Travis spluttered.

Nolan was more than capable of taking care of himself for a few hours. Would probably love the peace and quiet, if Travis’s family was as high-octane as he remembered. “I really don’t care.”

“Nah, it’s okay,” he said, doing a really bad job of not looking disappointed. “I can catch them at Christmas.”

“Don’t fucking pout at me.”

“God, fuck,” Travis said, and kicked him in the ankle. “I’m not _pouting_. Sorry if I have like, _one_ single feeling,” but it didn’t sound like he was actually pissed about it, so, whatever.

Travis’s brother Chase was staying at his place at Penn State, since they were all going up to State College anyway for the most traditional American farmhouse Thanksgiving imaginable. Travis was so excited he was bouncing, the magic of Christmas all but forgotten.

“The farm is like, my favorite place,” he kept telling Nolan, like Nolan was going to forget. They were in Chase’s room, because Travis’s mom had told him to go help Nolan get settled. Nolan had thrown his bag in a corner and sat on the bed, which was as much settling as he felt like he needed to do—especially since Travis was doing the opposite of settling anyone, anywhere. Travis was going to need to get scraped down off the ceiling. Or off the wall, after Nolan murdered him.

“Fuck, I wish I had some weed,” Nolan told him.

Travis stopped bouncing, balancing on one foot. “We can’t smoke up in my house, dude.”

“I’d make you some fucking brownies, then. Anything to get you to calm the fuck down.”

“Don’t be such a bummer, bro.” Travis launched himself at Chase’s bed, landing with a thump and a squeal of mattress springs. “I’m just happy, that’s all. I get to see my family, and go to my favorite place in the world, and, whatever. You’re here.”

“I can’t even look at you,” Nolan told him, because honestly: he couldn’t. Travis’s face was all scrunched up and his hair was greasy and cowlicked from the toque, and he had somehow managed to dig up a pair of sweatpants that were nastier than the sweatpants he had at school. There were like, stains on them—ambiguous ones—and he was also close enough that Nolan could feel his body heat, where one careless leg was resting against his back. “I am so embarrassed for you, all of the time,” he told him, which was better than all the other shit he could potentially say in this specific moment: like, _your stupid fucking face makes me want to die_, or _I’m gay_, or—

Wow! Buzzer, buddy. Time up on that train of thought.

“You say the sweetest fucking things, cupcake,” Travis said, kneeing him in the lower back. Like, a soft spot, next to his spine.

Nolan flopped backwards on top of him, and let his body turn into deadweight. Travis made some noises and struggled for a while, but fuck that: Nolan had been in real fights with big dudes, okay, and he had at least thirty pounds on Travis anyway.

“Guess we didn’t need pot, after all,” he said, once Travis had been quiet and still for at least ten seconds. Maybe because Nolan had his triceps pressed down on his windpipe and he was asphyxiating.

“You’re like one of those weighted blankets for nervous dogs,” Travis mumbled, and, fine, Nolan hadn’t really thought this through. Now that he wasn’t flailing around, Nolan could feel his mouth moving against his hair, the vibrations of his throat through the back of his arm.

“Get out of my bed,” he said. “Also, did you just call yourself a nervous dog.”

“Gotta get off me first.”

“Ugh,” said Nolan, and rolled sideways, making sure to elbow Travis in the face along the way. Chase’s bed was narrow, especially with Travis taking up like, two thirds of it. “I hate you.”

“I know.” Travis looked smug, smashing his face sideways into the pillow. A curl of his terrible greasy hair was falling across his forehead. “I love you too, babe.”

“You’re the fucking worst,” Nolan said, because there was nothing else he could possibly say. He smashed his palm into Travis’s face so he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

“Sweetheart,” Travis crooned, and Nolan didn’t need to be able to see his face to know he was grinning his stupid electric smile. At least until he licked Nolan’s palm, and they were wrestling again, face to face this time. Nolan had reach and weight and every possible advantage, other than the fact that he wasn’t a _dirty fucking cheater_, which he told Travis, loudly; Travis shot back _don’t start things you can’t finish, Nolan I-Don’t-Fucking-Know-Your-Middle-Name Patrick_; and Chase’s lamp got knocked off his bedside table with a crash, and then, somehow, they were nose to nose, breathing each other’s air, Travis pushing up against his chest and his ambiguous bluey-hazel eyes going a shocked kind of hot and—

Yeah.

That was always going to be the moment Travis’s mom knocked on the door. “You boys okay in there?”

“Fine, Mom,” Travis yelled, voice even like nothing had happened at all.

Which it hadn’t.

Nolan was the one with, whatever, a _problem_. All kinds of problems, actually.

He rolled off. Hit the floor. Lay there next to Chase’s busted lamp with his fucking stupid cheeks burning, looking up at the ceiling in Travis’s family’s Philadelphia rowhouse; not looking at Travis, the way he was hanging his head off the edge of the bed. All fucked-up and quizzical, like he didn’t get it at all.

But the thing about Travis was: it was impossible for him to feel awkward about anything, ever, even when he really should.

So, whatever, it was easier to go along with it. They were back to bumping elbows while they brushed their teeth in the tiny upstairs bathroom, with Nolan making fun of all the baby pictures of Travis stuck up in the hallway: a cheesy Christmas portrait, Travis in a Flyers sweater, Travis in tears with his tiny face all screwed up while Chase looked on in confusion.

“Is that what your face is going to look like,” Nolan asked him, “when I kick your ass on the ice tomorrow.”

Travis punched him in the shoulder, lingering in the doorway of his bedroom. It was dark inside, diffuse and shadowed from the yellow streetlight outside his window. “Fuck you, bro. Don’t play with my emotions.”

“I wouldn’t.” He whacked him back; told Travis that he needed to get over it, anyway.

“I don’t want you to do it if it’s just for me,” Travis said, blinking up at him. They were standing close, again, Travis leaning on his doorframe. Nolan could see a shelf over his shoulder, piled with jerseys and trophies and medals. Team photos, snapshots from family vacations. The corner of his narrow bed, covers still smooth because he hadn’t had a chance to fuck them up yet. “I can go on my own, Nolan, really. I know you haven’t skated since, you know.” He shrugged. Nolan didn’t remember telling him that, but it was true.

“It’s time,” Nolan said.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was time for one thing, even if it was never going to be the right time for another.

He lay in Chase’s bed that night, smelling the same laundry detergent that Travis used at school. His brain was piling up reasons for him to bail on skating: he didn’t have gear—he didn’t even have fucking _skates_. He was out of practice; he was going to embarrass himself. Maybe he’d go into the boards and fuck up his shoulder again. And he knew that wasn’t going to happen, but his brain was on a familiar _what-if-what-if-what-if_ anxiety track.

That had been useful to him, once upon a time. It had kept him focused, and it had made him prepare. He’d always wanted to play a 200-foot game; drilled ruthlessly until the play slowed down and muscle memory kicked in.

Right now he had every bit as much tension as he’d had going into Worlds, sloshing around in his stomach and tightening the muscles in his shoulders.

And it was for some open hockey drop-in hours with a bunch of kids who hadn’t even been good enough to go into the NCAA.

Fuck his entire fucking life.

He shifted onto his side, punching at the pillow. Travis was on the far side of the hallway, and the house was quiet: he’d maybe gotten too used to falling asleep to the sound of his breathing, or the quick click of laptop keys when Travis started his homework at one in the morning.

_u up_, he texted, before he thought about it.

_yeah_ came back immediately, then a minute later, the sound of his doorknob turning. All the lights were off and Travis’s phone was still lit up, shading a blue glow across the planes of his face.

“Halo or Call of Duty?” he whispered.

“Whatever,” Nolan answered, sitting up and scrubbing his hair back from his face.

They tiptoed downstairs, Travis poking him in the back when he stepped on a creaky stair. He held a finger up to his lips, like _Nolan_ was the one who had a problem with making too much noise, and snuck a glass of whiskey out of a bottle on the bar. They sat on the floor in front of the TV with the volume down low, passing the whiskey glass back and forth.

Nolan’s brain didn’t quiet down, exactly. Neither did the thump in his chest when he let himself pay attention to the way their knees brushed together, cross-legged on Travis’s living room rug; Travis shit-talking in a whisper, because he couldn’t help himself; or the angle of Travis’s mouth when he smirked up at him, triumphant eyes and his lame-ass chirps.

He had a crick in his neck when he woke up, and something was cutting off the circulation in his arm. Nolan’s head was leaned awkwardly back against the edge of the couch, and Travis had inserted himself against his side, one hand sprawled across Nolan’s thigh. His head fit perfectly into the curve of Nolan’s neck. Halo’s menu music was still playing on the TV, and the empty whisky glass had tipped over in Nolan’s lap.

Nolan didn’t know what to do: wake him up, shove him off, never move again.

He couldn’t remember what had happened, exactly. They’d been fucking around, trading the controller back and forth and letting the time between rounds spill out for longer and longer while Travis’s spoken-word stream of consciousness got slower and slower. Nolan had finished the whiskey and then shut his eyes during one of Travis’s rounds, still holding the glass in his lap; the last thing he could remember was the staccato of video-game gunfire, and the cool surface of the whiskey glass against his fingertips.

He could hear footsteps creaking upstairs, then the jingle of the Konecny family Labrador as he came charging down the stairs, heading straight for Travis.

“Fuck, Jake,” Travis said, eyes squeezed shut as Jake thumped his tail against the couch and gave him a good-morning face wash. He didn’t seem concerned about anyone’s personal bubble, levering himself up with a laugh and digging his fingers into the fur around Jake’s neck. “Who’s a very bad boy?”

Nolan’s arm was starting to tingle with pins and needles, and he heaved himself up off the floor, his shoulder feeling weirdly cold. “What should I do with the glass?”

“Oh, shit,” Travis said, not sounding particularly bothered about it. Footsteps were approaching the top of the stairs.

“This is such a fucking backward-ass country.”

“You can leave any time, cupcake.” He grinned up at Nolan, crooked and still sleepy in the cool light from the TV, and shoved the glass under the sofa. Which, not what Nolan would have chosen, but whatever.

“Did you boys sleep down here?” Travis’s mom asked in disbelief, halfway down the stairs. “_Travis_.”

“Whatever, it got late.” Travis held up a hand, wagging it around until Nolan hauled him up to his feet. The little fucker was heavier than he looked—maybe Nolan should stop working him so hard in the gym.

Travis and his mom made breakfast while his dad took the dog out, retreading what sounded like a long-standing argument about how to fix the eggs. Nolan knew Travis liked his scrambled; apparently the rest of the family was more about sunny side up, so Nolan agreed with Mrs. Konecny just to be contrary.

Travis fixed him with a dead-eyed stare over his mom’s shoulder, narrowed his eyes and mouthed _traitor_.

Nolan smiled back and hit the start button on the coffee machine, because unlike some Americans he’d been raised with proper good manners.

Open hours at the rink were pretty early, so Nolan felt like he’d barely finished his (delicious) sunny side eggs and toast before Travis was herding him out the door, assuring him he’d put out the bat signal that his buddy from school needed some gear. It was barely light out when Travis slammed the back door of his mom’s minivan, and Nolan had to confront a new problem: the fact that known space cadet Travis Konecny was about to drive him around a major metropolitan area in a multi-ton metal death machine.

“It’s so weird that I haven’t driven since school started,” Travis said, inspiring no confidence as he inched his way backwards out of the narrow alley behind the house while simultaneously fucking with the pre-sets on the radio.

“Stop that.” Nolan slapped his hand off the stereo and located an aux cable.

“Ugh, I don’t want to listen to your emo sad boy guitar shit,” Travis whined.

Travis could go fuck himself with his Top 40 nonsense, and Nolan told him so. The Head and the Heart was a band that appealed to people with _taste_. Which Nolan had. Unlike Travis.

They kept arguing about music while Travis eased the minivan out onto the narrow street running by his house. Nolan could see the neighborhood a little better, now: uneven brick rowhouses with their front steps right up on the street, a Polish grocery, the stripes of powerlines. The downtown skyline rose in the distance, cold blue peaks in the morning air.

Travis braked at a stop sign, and they watched a ragged-looking woman push a shopping cart across the intersection.

“It’s not like, the best neighborhood,” he said quietly, eyes straight ahead.

“It’s a city, bud.”

“Yeah.” Travis sighed and took his foot off the brake. “My family’s just been here forever, I guess. My grandpa says it didn’t used to be like this. But now it’s getting all gentrified and shit anyway.”

“Good vocab,” Nolan said, honestly kind of impressed that Travis had used the word “gentrified” in a sentence.

He shot Nolan an offended glare over his shoulder, instead of watching where he was going. Nolan could never quite figure out what color his eyes were—blue or green or something in between. “I know shit, Nols.”

“Do you know how to drive, though,” Nolan asked, when he had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a truck covered in Eagles bumper stickers.

Travis sent him a one-fingered salute as they merged onto the interstate, headed north away from the skyline. Nolan watched the cranes of the Port of Philadelphia emerge into the early-morning light, ghost scaffolds against the gray November sky. Travis told him about how his grandad had worked there for years, scraping together pennies to send his mom and his aunt to college.

They exited before too much longer, crossing a bridge over the flat gray of the Delaware River and into New Jersey. Nolan had no idea Philadelphia was so close to New Jersey, but that was the kind of thing he couldn’t admit or Travis would call him _such a fucking Canadian_. Which, whatever, Nolan would bet his last (American) dollar that Travis couldn’t find the province of Manitoba on a map.

“Where’s the capital of Canada?” Nolan asked him, because it was easier to think about how bad Americans were at geography than think about the fact that they were getting closer to the rink by the minute.

“Toronto,” Travis answered with perfect confidence. Then, “Wait, why are you looking at me like that? It’s not Toronto?” like he had been personally betrayed by his own stupidity. He started running through NHL teams to try to name Canadian cities. It took him a pretty long time to get to the Sens, and even Nolan couldn’t blame him for that.

This rink looked more like the ones Nolan was used to than the one at school did, a familiar low-slung box in the middle of an industrial park where all the businesses had vague signs reading Pro World or Specialty Engineering. There were no arcade games in the lobby, no laser tag; just club banners, schedules, hype-up posters of the Flyers, a few glass cases full of trophies.

Only one of Travis’s high school buddies was there, so they must be early. He was straight up massive, taller and broader than Nolan, with blunt features and messy blond hair, and he was lugging an extra gear bag. He dropped it when Travis bounced straight into his arms, landing with an _oof_ and an audible thud of impact. Nolan knew who he was, he realized, even though he would have sworn he never paid attention when Travis talked about his buddies from home: Lawson.

“Shit, TK, you got heavy,” he said, thumping him on the back. “Freshman fifteen, buddy?”

“Nah. This asshole, man,” Travis said, chucking a thumb at Nolan over his shoulder. “Slave driver in the gym.”

“He still lazy?” Lawson asked Nolan.

“The worst,” Nolan agreed.

“_You’re_ the worst,” Travis complained. “Fucking _gym_ major, I can’t even with your bullshit.”

“It’s called _kinesiology_, dumbass, or does that have too many syllables,” Nolan fired back, and that long-standing argument carried them through signing in at the front desk and into the empty locker room. Lawson was watching them with a kind of amused expression, Nolan noticed, eyes flicking back and forth like a tennis match; and that made him weirdly self-conscious, almost enough for a totally fucking unwarranted blush to start heating up his cheeks. But whatever, he was on edge anyway, smelling the familiar reek of a locker room and sorting through Lawson’s brother’s unfamiliar gear.

“Is everybody else super late, or what?” Nolan asked while he tried to figure out his borrowed shoulder pads. He hadn’t worn gear that didn’t fit his exact fucking preferences in—forever.

Travis looked shifty all of a sudden, before he bent to pay some totally unwarranted attention to his shin guards. “I, uh. Figured you might want a little time before everyone showed up. So we’re kind of. Early.”

And that hit Nolan in the chest. He mumbled a _yeah whatever thanks_ in Travis’s general direction, and finished suiting up in all this shit that didn’t quite fit.

The ice was smooth, pristine, and Nolan couldn’t help thinking that maybe Travis had—he couldn’t fucking imagine—found a string to pull to make this happen. There had only been a couple cars in the lot, the guy at the front desk looking early-morning sleepy but not surprised to see them. Nobody here but Lawson, who had been Travis’s best friend since he was like, six. He didn’t even know when Travis would have found the time to make a call; they’d been in each other’s pockets since last night.

Fuck Travis, _actually_, for making it into a _thing_. Nolan didn’t need this kid-glove treatment.

That was what Nolan should have been thinking, and he did, in fact, think the words. Directed them to scroll across his brain, like subtitles that didn’t quite match what was happening on the screen.

He didn’t want to think about what Travis had or hadn’t told Lawson or the guy at the front desk. Didn’t want to think about why Travis would think any of this was necessary; didn’t want to have to admit to himself that he appreciated it, felt Travis’s consideration as a warm curl in his stomach, like the heat of his fingers curving over Nolan’s thigh.

So instead of thinking about it he took one breath, then two, and stepped out onto the ice.

It was anticlimactic after all of that, except in the ways that it profoundly fucking wasn’t. Skating felt as familiar as walking, as breathing: the smooth texture of the ice under his slightly too-big skates, which were almost certainly going to give him blisters; the rush of wind against his face when he picked up the pace; the rhythm of his legs stroking against the ice, one after another. And the feeling that he was gliding weightless, not dragging himself along the frictional surface of the ground.

“Your boy’s got some moves,” he heard Lawson say, while he was zigzagging his way around the perimeter of the rink. He didn’t even have a puck at the end of his stick, yet; was just skating around imaginary d-men, getting his legs back under him.

“Well he’s fucking Canadian, so,” Travis said, “it would be embarrassing if he didn’t.”

Just for that, Nolan did a flashy stop, showered Travis in ice. “_You’re_ a fucking embarrassment.”

They didn’t have that much longer until the rest of Travis’s boys—along with whatever other randos were coming for the open ice session—showed up. Nolan was feeling like an embarrassment by then, actually; would love to say that dangling the puck and going bar down felt as easy as breathing. But the truth was that he hadn’t touched a hockey stick in over a year, and he was rusty as hell, losing control of the biscuit and firing it wide of the goal. Even losing an edge a couple of times and skidding a little, totally unforced like he played on the Big Red’s embarrassment of a club hockey team.

Lawson and Travis were still looking a little bug-eyed. Travis’s mouth was actually open, like he wanted to find something to chirp but for once in his life he couldn’t locate a word.

“You’re like, pretty good,” Lawson said, questioning.

“Not good enough,” Nolan said. Like always it was the truth and it wasn’t, at the same time.

“But, like,” Lawson continued, “what exactly were you not good enough for, because—”

Travis stuck an elbow in his side, totally blatant. “Look, it’s the boys!”

Travis’s boys were even worse than the club team. Not all of them skated regularly anymore, although some of them were on club teams or DIII or whatever. Nolan couldn’t remember the last time he’d played hockey with people who were this straight up—not on his level, unless he’d gotten conned into volunteering at a youth camp or some shit like that. Shinny in the Patrick family driveway was more pulled-together.

But even if nobody could complete a pass to save their lives, and even if people ran into each other, and even if Nolan could slice through every line of defense like a hot knife through butter, it was still—fun.

Being out on the ice, just fucking around, no expectations or pressure.

No fucking _pain_, which was kind of a revelation. It was another kind of revelation to realize he couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d played hockey, and not had it hurt. Physically, sure, but also the slipping-through-his-fingers feeling of his last season, trying to stay on top of the prospect rankings because _fuck_ Nico Hischier—worrying about his numbers, worrying about his shoulder, worrying about an intermittent stabbing pain in his hip that he’d refused to mention to one single fucking person. Worrying about his entire future, basically. Worrying he wouldn’t make it. Worrying that if he did, it would just be more of the same fucking grind: play, get hurt, come back, repeat, struggle and struggle and struggle to make up the ground he knew damn well he was losing.

This was not that.

It was: dangle the shit out of these assholes.

It was: put the fear of God into the poor fucker between the pipes.

It was: saucer a pass to Travis and watch him tear (well, the B-team version of tear) down the ice on a breakaway, and bury the puck five-hole. Watch his stupid fist-pump and celly, feel the solid impact of his body when he came in for his post-goal hug. “You’re fucking amazing,” Travis told him, grinning wide enough to split his face in half. “Holy shit, bud.”

The boys and the randos were looking a little shell-shocked, afterwards. The community randos headed for the locker rooms, but the former Benedictine hockey team lingered out on the ice, shooting the shit and sending Nolan _looks_ out of the corners of their eyes.

Lawson organized everyone to take a picture to send to their high school coach. Nolan stripped off his gloves and accepted Travis’s phone, snapping the stereotypical buddies hockey pic: Travis and Lawson sprawled on the ice in the first row, a grab bag of dipshits grinning behind them.

When that was done Travis bounced—seriously, how did he manage to bounce in skates—back up to him, dragged Nolan in for a stupid selfie with their sweaty hair and Nolan’s face bright red.

It looked nice, though, when Travis texted it to him. They looked—happy, Travis with his stupidly huge grin and his face halfway crinkled up, Nolan caught halfway through a laugh at whatever dumb shit Travis had been saying, their heads tilted in towards each other.

Nolan sent it to his family group text. Mads and Aimee responded immediately, thumbs-up emojis and a hockey gif. It took longer for his parents, not until they were back in the minivan, high above the Delaware River. _Nolan I’m so happy to see that_, his mom said. _Your father and I are so proud of you_.

“Thanks,” Nolan said to the Konecny family minivan’s dashboard, when Travis was parking in the alley behind the house.

“Of course,” Travis said, voice quiet like he got it. He reached out, put his hand on Nolan’s shoulder and gave it a shake; left it there for a second afterwards, thumb pressed into the space at the outside edge of his collarbone, right on top of the uneven ridge of his scar tissue.

Travis tour-guided him around Philadelphia for the rest of the day—the Rocky steps, Reading Terminal Market, the Liberty Bell. Nolan only bitched a little about his blisters; Travis only told him to stop whining six or seven times. They got into an actual fight when Nolan declared that his cheesesteak was “fine,” mostly to mess with Travis but also because he couldn’t see why you would fuck up perfectly good steak with literal Cheez Whiz.

(It was a really good day, actually.)

They were up early again on American Thanksgiving Day, helping Travis’s parents load a bunch of shit in Tupperware into the back of the minivan. Nolan wasn’t sure who looked more excited, Travis or Jake the Lab—they were both vibrating, Jake’s tail a steady thump against the upholstery and Travis keeping up an uninterrupted flow of chatter before he’d even finished his coffee.

“You really fucking love this farm, eh,” Nolan said. They were squeezed in the back row of seats, Jake and Travis’s granddad in the second row.

“It’s the fucking best.” Travis bounced in place.

“You know my family has a farm, too,” Nolan pointed out. “It’s not that great, bud.”

“You are _so fucking wrong_,” Travis moaned. “How are you so wrong _all of the time_.”

“It’s not even deer season.”

“Ugh, such a bummer.” He paused, staring out the window at the Pennsylvania Turnpike blurring past, then swung back around. “We can still fish, though.”

Nolan knew a lot of fishermen, but even he had never met anyone who could talk about fishing as much as Travis. He let himself kind of zone out, listening to the rhythm of Travis’s voice over his parents’ old-person rock station on the radio; it reminded him some of driving up to the lake cabin with his family, hiding in the way-back of his mom’s Suburban with Madison and telling Aimee she could only get in the back with them when she got older. Nolan was way too big for the back row of a minivan at this point in his life, but it was kind of—nostalgic or whatever, comfortable in its way: Travis talking his ear off instead of his sisters, the murmur of the adult conversations up in the front, with his legs stretched out into the space at the center of the second row of seats.

“Are you sleeping?” Travis asked him after a while.

“No,” Nolan said, even though his eyes were closed and everything had faded to an easy, dulled-out distance. They’d stayed up late again last night, not even pretending to game or anything, just sprawled out on the living room couch making fun of shit on Travis’s Instagram, giggling like a pair of total dumbasses at YouTube videos of kids wiping out on skateboards. (Travis’s phone had been blowing up with texts and snaps from his boys, some party or something, and Nolan had asked if he wanted to go and he’d kicked him in the side and smiled and said, _nah I’m good here_ and Nolan’s stomach had done that complicated flip it seemed to be doing more and more.)

“You’re such a liar,” said Travis. His voice was all—affectionate, maybe, and Nolan shouldn’t be noticing things like that about his straight buddy roommate, but he couldn’t fucking seem to stop himself.

He did fall asleep after that, for real; only woke up hours later when the minivan’s wheels hit the gravel of the farm’s driveway. Travis was way too far into his personal space, grinning like a fucking lunatic right in his face.

“We’re gonna have the best time,” he announced.

Nolan smashed a hand over his face and pushed. “Shut up, I hate you.”

“I’m gonna kick your ass at skeet shooting.”

“Language!” his mom yelled from the front.

“Sorry,” Travis called, not sounding sorry at all, and filled Nolan in on the itinerary of redneck shit he’d spent the whole three and a half hours of the drive planning. He even had like, a bullet list on his phone, which was—a lot.

The farm itself was both similar and different from the ones Nolan was used to, in Winnipeg: same farm mutt racing beside the van, bouncing and barking and setting Jake off; same black creosote fencing, same black Angus cows clustered together by a round bale of hay. But there were hills and more trees, the mowed-down crop fields tiny in comparison to the endless spreads out on the Manitoba prairies. A massive fieldstone barn sat in a scaffold of red outbuildings, significantly larger than the tidy white farmhouse tucked back behind it.

“Come on, we’re going four-wheeling,” Travis announced as soon as the car was in park, seatbelt already whipped off.

“You’re getting unpacked and saying hello to your aunt and uncle,” Travis’s mom countered.

Travis’s response to that was an audible moan of disappointment, but he dutifully helped haul stuff into the house and introduced Nolan around: his aunt and uncle who owned the farm plus another set, a collection of second cousins, a handwave at Chase. The guys were all clustered around football pre-game coverage on the TV and the whole place smelled like roasting turkey and pumpkin, and it was like, a fucking postcard from America.

“You’re a living stereotype,” he told Travis when they were upstairs, dropping their shit in a spare bedroom with two tiny twin beds. Travis was scrabbling around in the closet, emerging with a beat-to-shit Carhartt coat that he zipped up with obvious pleasure. It was covered in literal mud and it was at least two sizes too big, but he looked happy as hell to be dialing up his redneck rating.

“Don’t rain on my parade, sunshine.”

“I think it’s literally about to start raining, so.” The sky through the window did not look promising.

“Are you soft or something?” Travis asked. “It’s just a little rain.”

It was not a little rain. It was a fucking deluge that hit when the two of them were about twenty minutes out on the four wheelers, Chase and the cousins having declined to join Travis on the first bullet point of his redneck itinerary.

“I hate you,” Nolan yelled over the roar of the four wheelers and the roar of the like, monsoon of rain bucketing down on their heads.

“Love you too, babe,” Travis yelled back. He looked halfway demented, hair plastered down to his skull and face covered in mud. Nolan at least had a hat; Travis had declared _it’s not gonna rain bud_ with the cheerful optimism of like, an infant who did not have access to a weather app or the ability to look at the sky.

Nolan didn’t know what that said about him, since he had both of those things and had still gone along with it.

Travis’s four-wheeler got stuck in the mud in the back pasture, because of course it did. Neither ATV was carrying a tow chain and Nolan wasn’t sure how well that would have gone anyway, with the rain still coming down and the mud getting slicker and slicker; so Travis ended up on the back of his quad bike, one arm wrapped around Nolan’s stomach and declining to leave a few no-homo inches.

Which was whatever. There was absolutely nothing sexy about it, with the mud and the rain and, okay, Nolan wasn’t scared of whatever quote cold unquote Pennsylvania could throw at him—but like, it was objectively not warm when you were soaked through and it was below 4C and the wind was picking up. Travis was an effective windbreak, at least, and the weather was miserable enough that he could distract himself from the way Travis felt plastered up against his back, the strong lines of his hockey quads and the shoulders that Nolan had helped him pack with muscle.

“I fucking hate you,” Nolan called over his shoulder, because it needed repeating. “This is the actual worst.”

Travis tightened the squeeze around his midsection. “Shut up and drive!”

Chase and the cousins all made fun of them when they finally dragged back into the house, stopping in the mudroom while Travis yelled for towels. Nolan’s hands were numb and he was probably going to get pneumonia and die and it would all be Travis’s fault, but he somehow couldn’t quite find it in himself to regret it all the way, either: Travis looked like a half-drowned rat, shivering and at least nominally apologetic, if nominally apologetic meant launching himself at Nolan with the first wave of towels, scrubbing at the mud and water in his hair and somehow making an even bigger mess.

They both stripped most of the way down in the mudroom, Travis scandalizing the aunts and some cousin’s new fiancée when he went charging to the laundry machine half-naked with an armload of dripping-wet clothes. It was a complete fucking disaster and all Nolan could do was watch from the relative safety of the mudroom, trying not to laugh until he actually cried at the scandalized shrieks tracking Travis’s progress through the house.

He’d have died before he let Travis see that, but Travis was on the other side of the house getting yelled at by his mom, so Nolan figured it was safe enough—at least until he caught Chase looking at him, with a kind of measuring expression on his face.

“You are actually as batshit insane as Travis,” Chase said.

“Uhm, no,” Nolan offered, unable to quite play it off with his usual monotone chill when he was wearing boxers and dripping mud on Travis’s aunt’s floor. He was pretty sure the mud was crusting his hair into like, full-on dreadlocks, which was not a look he’d ever been interested in.

Chase snorted. “You’d better grab the shower first, the hot water heater in this place sucks ass.”

Nolan wrapped a muddy towel around his waist—he figured Travis’s family had been scandalized enough already—and walked through the football scrum in the living room with as much dignity as he could muster.

Which was not a lot.

Travis was in the bedroom when Nolan got out of the shower, warm again and with at least a pound of mud washed out of his hair. Travis had wrapped himself in like, three towels and was staring at the print of ducks flying over a pond that hung over the room’s red-painted dresser. If Nolan was not very much mistaken, he looked like he was bordering on—bummed. Like all his cheerful manic excitement had gotten snuffed out, between the rain and the yelling and the chirping from his family.

That was new, and Nolan didn’t like it.

“What’s up, bud,” he asked, scrubbing a (clean) towel through his hair.

“Nothing,” Travis said, and heaved a giant sigh.

Nolan hung the towel on the back of the doorknob and gave him a pointed look. Travis was not like, known for hiding his feelings. “Bro.”

“Are you actually mad at me? Like, do you actually hate this,” Travis asked, talking to the ducks. “I know I can be—a lot.”

“Why do you think I’m mad at you?”

“I dunno. You tell me you hate me like, all the time, and I know I kind of—drag you into things. And that whole four-wheeling thing was such a fucking disaster and I should have listened about the stupid rain, but I was, I dunno, excited and I didn’t think. My uncle’s gonna kill me for getting the ATV stuck.” His shoulders were all hunched in, and that was wrong: Travis was supposed to be larger than life, stupid grins and the spark of a laugh.

“I thought we decided that every time I insulted you, it was actually like. Nice.”

Travis huffed a laugh, quietly. Not a real one; not the right one. “That’s not real, though.”

Nolan stepped closer to him. He could see the outline of Travis’s face in the glass covering the duck print, the outline of his own shoulders as he stepped in behind him, the glint of a gold chain against the back of his neck. He couldn’t actually stop himself from reaching out: but it was just hands on his shoulders, buddy shit. Nothing serious (nothing like the way he wanted to touch Travis, maybe), and he wasn’t paying attention to how cold Travis’s skin was under his hands, the way it pebbled up with gooseflesh; the way bone and muscle shifted as he felt Travis suck in a breath.

“Who says it’s not?”

Travis went very still, staring at the ducks or the vague definition of their silhouettes in the glass; as still as Nolan had ever seen him, at least while he was awake. Then he let the breath out, slow and shaky under Nolan’s hands, and leaned back against his body, tugging one of Nolan’s arms down across his chest. He was cold all over, every place their skin was touching, but it didn’t matter since Nolan was frozen in place, anyway, nose almost touching his hair. He could feel Travis’s heartbeat under his arm, and he didn’t get why things kept spiraling so far out of control on this stupid trip, why he couldn’t manage to keep it chill with Travis’s entire extended family a floor away; he didn’t understand why Travis was still leaning into his chest, why he wasn’t _moving_ when he was always fucking moving.

He didn’t know how long they stood like that, Nolan keeping his eyes fixed on the top of Travis’s head; Travis staring at the ducks and letting Nolan carry his weight.

Travis shook it off, eventually, when there were footsteps on the stairs and the creak of a floorboard in the hall outside. Nolan had to remind his arm how to relax, how to let him go.

“I should get in the shower.”

“Yeah, you’re disgusting.”

Travis wrinkled his nose and left a pile of muddy towels in the middle of the floor. Nolan picked them up, because he didn’t know what else to do. Whatever the fuck that little moment had been was over by the time Travis got back, dripping all over the floor and bitching about how the hot water had run out.

They went back downstairs after that, Travis diving into his family like he was genuinely happy to see them. There weren’t enough seats in the living room so they ended up on the floor again, Travis letting his legs sprawl into Nolan’s personal space like it was nothing while the Lions and the Vikings raced up and down the field. Nolan could follow football well enough, he wasn’t some totally out of touch loser, but he didn’t know the players and he didn’t sit down to watch it with the intensity that Travis’s family seemed to.

So it was easier to be quiet and let the conversation and the heckling and the occasional yells wash over him. Just be there, Travis bumping their knees together and leaning on his shoulder, until his mom was yelling that someone needed to come set the table for dinner. And that was a whole adventure, arguing with Travis about what fork went where and how many places to set at the overflow kids’ table that was sitting awkwardly in the front hallway.

“I don’t understand how you two haven’t killed each other,” Chase said, following behind them with a pitcher to fill up water glasses.

“We tried and it didn’t really work,” Travis told him cheerfully. “I’m too charming and fun.”

“You’re the worst,” Nolan said instead.

“Yeah, I’m with the big guy,” Chase smirked.

Dinner itself was fine. Travis and Nolan got to sit at the big table with the adults, since Nolan was a guest; Chase was glaring daggers from the kids’ table, while Travis visibly gloated. It was basically just—a dinner, and Nolan didn’t understand what the big deal was, really: lots of beige food, a massive turkey, and Travis covering everything on his plate in gravy, even the green bean casserole. There were so many chairs crammed around the table that their elbows kept knocking into each other.

They did actually do the thing Nolan had seen on TV, where Travis’s uncle said grace and then they went around the table announcing what they were thankful for. Nolan felt like Travis should have given him some warning, maybe a heads-up that he’d have to do like, public speaking. That was maybe the thing about hockey that he missed the least: getting put on the spot and having to come up with a media (or in this case family) ready soundbite.

“I’m thankful for,” he started, and of course Travis kicked him in the ankle when he thought Nolan was pausing too long, “oh, fu—I mean, oh, _fine_. I’m thankful for being welcome with your family today, and, whatever, I guess I’m thankful to have made such good friends in college. Even Travis. Or whatever.”

Travis hooked their ankles together under the table, like that was a thing they did, and then rambled for ten minutes straight about everything that flitted across the surface of his mind. Chase finally yelled at him to shut up, all the way from his table in the hallway, and that set off a whole extended Konecny family altercation and Nolan really, really, _really_ was not in Canada anymore: he didn’t think anyone had ever raised a voice at a Patrick family dinner in his entire life, not even when his dad and his uncle got into it over the Jets. Not even that one year at Christmas when his mom had accidentally gotten super drunk on wine. Not even in the deepest hellpit of Madison’s teenage bitchery. Not—ever.

“It’s so fucking loud,” he whispered to Travis, who seemed to have moved out of the crosshairs of the argument.

“Yeah, this is nothing.” Travis was dumping an entire gravy boat onto his second serving of mashed potatoes, totally unbothered. “You should wait for my dad and my uncle to get drunk and start in on Sidney Crosby.”

“What the fuck is wrong with Sidney Crosby?”

“Oh, buddy.” Travis gave him a mournful look, ruined by the wicked glint in his eyes. He raised his voice, because he was such a little shit-stirrer—Nolan knew he didn’t even hate Sid that much, which was unusual for a Flyers fan. “Hey, dad, do you know that Sidney Crosby is Nolan’s favorite hockey player? Team Canada, _eh_?”

“What—I don’t—_you know it’s Jonathan Toews_,” he hissed at Travis, not that it fucking mattered, because an entire metric ton of hatred for the Pittsburgh Penguins was immediately raining down on his head.

And like, Nolan did not actually care that much. But also there was no way he was going to listen to a Team Canada Triple Gold-winning captain get bashed by a bunch of _Americans_.

“I hate you,” he told Travis, for like, the fifth time that day. This time he might really _mean_ it, though. Shit had never really calmed down at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and Nolan had found himself _raising his voice at Travis’s uncle_ to interrupt a monologue on why Sid was a diver, and a cheater, and soft. Nobody else noticed or cared, since the default setting in the extended Konecny family seemed to be: max volume, but Nolan had.

“Thanks, sweetheart.” Travis grinned, a flicker of white teeth through the gloom of the upstairs bedroom. They were both in bed, the house quiet around them: Chase gone back to his apartment near campus in State College proper, the cousins and extra aunts and uncles departed. Their room had that late night road trip kind of feeling, where Nolan was tired but he couldn’t imagine shutting his eyes and trying to go to sleep. “I just wanted to make sure you had the whole, you know. Family experience. I didn’t want you to feel excluded just ‘cause you’re foreign or whatever.”

“You should be excluded from _life_.”

“You’d miss me.”

“I absolutely fucking would not.”

“You would.”

“No,” said Nolan. “I could do my own shit in the gym, and not trip on your clothes all over the fucking floor, and nobody would take the last cup of _my_ coffee.”

“You would be so fucking sad,” Travis continued, like he was immune to Nolan’s words. “Just like when you got to school. You know you would be, Nols.”

“I wasn’t _sad_.”

“Okay, yeah, tough guy.” He could see Travis’s shoulders shrug, under his paint-smudged Penn State Ag sweatshirt and the patchwork quilt on the bed. “Whatever you say.”

“Fuck you, okay,” Nolan fired back, mad all of a sudden. He sat up, swung his legs out of the tiny little twin bed. The floor was cold on his bare feet. “You don’t know what it was like.”

“Of course I don’t!” Travis sat up too, leaned into the negative space between the two beds. “Because God forbid you _talk_ to me. Or anyone. Ryanne doesn’t even know your whole backstory, does she? And she’s supposed to be your _bestie_. Would you even have told me, if I hadn’t googled you like a fucking stalker?”

Nolan rolled his eyes. Didn’t think of anything besides scoring the point when he said, “Yeah, whatever, dude. I know you’re obsessed with me.”

That hit Travis like a blow: he rocked back, fast enough to make the mattress springs protest. His eyes were all wide and he looked—hurt. Shocked and hurt, different from the way he’d been earlier in the day; but he got mad fast enough. Nolan watched it twist over his face. He wished with a sick lurch in his stomach that he could reset the clock on the last minute of his life.

“Fuck. You,” Travis hissed, and then he was up and gone, slamming the door hard enough to rattle that goddamned duck print against the wall.

The thing was: Nolan hadn’t meant to say that.

Or maybe he had. He could remember plenty of times back home, tearing into Madison the way you could when you really, truly knew someone’s weak spots. She’d come right back, eyes blazing with that goddamned Patrick red firing up in her cheeks: she’d tell him he was a bitch, that one day he was going to roll his eyes or make one of his stupid little under-the-breath-comments to the wrong damned person. That he was going to be _mean_ the way he got when he was really pissed off, because _Jesus Christ Nolan, it’s easier for you to try to hurt me than it is for you to admit something hard about yourself_—and that he was going to regret it. 

Nolan had to wonder—sitting cross-legged on a tiny twin bed in fucking State College, Pennsylvania, of all the goddamned places in the world—if she’d been right about that.

He found Travis downstairs, sitting on the couch with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He was staring at highlights from the Chargers-Cowboys game on the TV like his life depended on it, and Jake was lying on the couch even though Nolan knew he wasn’t allowed, head on Travis’s lap. His tail gave a single thump when he saw Nolan coming down the stairs. Everything else in the house was silent, just Nolan and Travis and the dog in a little yellow pool of light from the one lamp Travis’s aunt had left on overnight.

“I’m sorry,” Nolan made himself say. He couldn’t quite look at Travis’s face; instead he focused on the curve of his shoulder, where it was wrapped up in the blue and white plaid of the blanket. “That was a shitty thing to say.”

“Whatever.” Travis’s shoulder rolled into a shrug. Nolan wasn’t looking at his face but he knew he was still focused on the TV, the hit after hit scrolling across the screen. “It’s probably true, so. I always get too intense about people. Chase has been telling me that since I was six, and maybe I should fucking listen for once.”

Nolan eased himself down onto the couch. Dug his fingers into the fur on Jake’s back to give himself something to focus on, other than the set of Travis’s jaw and how he was absolutely refusing to look at Nolan. Made himself admit to the shit that his older sibling told him, too, how when he got mad he struck out, like life was a fucking hockey game and he was trying to make the hit before someone else had a chance. (He didn’t know how to say the rest of it: that he liked Travis the way he was, with his enthusiasm and his intensity; liked Travis in a way that probably went deeper than chill buddies, in a way that scared the shit out of him.)

So instead—moving slowly so Travis had plenty of time to move out of the way or tell him to fuck off—Nolan reached over Jake to slide his arm around Travis’s shoulders, over the sweatshirt and the blanket. He could still feel the hard lines of his body, even through the layers: muscles and bones that he should probably know the names of, all spring-loaded with tension that Travis suddenly let go, breathing out in a shuddery whoosh of air before he collapsed against Nolan’s side.

Jake made a grumbling noise and heaved himself down off the couch, hitting the floor with a thump and a jangle of tags. Travis was heavy against Nolan’s ribcage; it seemed like he was trying to make himself smaller, to tuck himself into the angles of Nolan’s body. He was such a, whatever, _presence_ with his loud mouth and his big personality—Nolan didn’t know what to do with this version of Travis, exactly, other than let him push his face into his neck and hang on, let his hand drift up and down Travis’s back over the blanket.

Travis mumbled something into the shoulder of his sweatshirt.

“What?”

“You have the biggest hands,” he said, more clearly.

Nolan didn’t know what to do with the hot rush of arousal he felt at that. Or, he did, because he knew exactly what he wanted to do: drag Travis all the way onto his lap (he was enough smaller that Nolan could, Jesus Christ, really throw him around if he wanted to; and that was a thought he’d never let himself have before, but there it was), and then kiss him, bite at the full curve of his lower lip until he was a total mess. He’d probably talk a lot, run his mouth like he always did—tell Nolan all the shit he wanted to do to him, tell him he was good, make all kinds of fucking noise. And fuck: Nolan wanted to find out what it would take to get him so far out of his head that he’d finally shut up.

But Nolan wasn’t going to do any of that.

What he was going to do instead was let Travis stay tucked into his shoulder, fingers all twisted up in the fabric of his sweatshirt, and keep watching football highlights while the wall clock in the kitchen ticked towards the morning.

Nolan must have fallen asleep eventually, trying not to breathe in the smell of Travis’s hair, because he woke up to Travis shaking his shoulder.

“Hey, bud,” he whispered, right in Nolan’s face, close enough that he could feel the puff of his breath.

“Yeah?” His voice was all low and raspy, either from sleep or from the warm weight of Travis leaning into him. Something flickered on Travis’s face, too quickly for Nolan’s sleep-fogged brain to track, and he was tilting his head a little, tongue on his lower lip and swallowing, like—

Like absolutely fucking nothing.

Because what he said was, “You think we could go get that four-wheeler out?”

And then they went out on Travis’s family’s farm at three fucking o’clock in the morning, Travis vanishing into the main barn and coming out with a length of chain over his shoulder, Nolan trying to get the other ATV out of the shed without letting the engine crank above a low rumble. It had stopped raining, at least, even though it was still slippery as hell with all the mud, and Nolan didn’t exactly know how this was going to work out: Jake whining at the back door because he was getting left behind, their headlamps bouncing around in the darkness, and Travis’s arm wrapped across his stomach again, cheek pressed against the back of his neck.

They ended up absolutely goddamned _covered_ in mud again. Nolan was very carefully _not_ swearing out loud at Travis and the muck and the rain and how this was a failure of the entire concept of ATVs—like, some fucking penance or something—until Travis grinned up at him, teeth a flash of white in the beam of Nolan’s headlamp: “Come on, dude, I know you’ve got some shit to say about this,” and Nolan was pretty sure they were back to normal, then.

They did get the quad bike back to the barn, eventually. Nolan wasn’t sure how sneaky they ended up being, as they did the whole towels-and-filth dance in the mudroom again, shoving at each other as they snuck upstairs. Travis got the first shower, but he was still up when Nolan crept back into the guest bedroom, standing between the beds and messing with something on his phone. His hair was in wet curls against the neck of his hoodie, and he hadn’t moved by the time Nolan had thrown on his last clean sweatshirt.

“Go the fuck to sleep.”

He looked up from the blue light of his phone, shrugged. “Dunno, I’m pretty wired now. Sweet taste of victory and all that shit.”

“Keep it to yourself.” Nolan yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw, and headed for his tiny-ass twin bed.

Stopped, immediately, when he felt Travis touch his arm. “You’ve still got a spot,” he said, and then he was reaching up, rubbing a thumb over Nolan’s cheek. He was close again, the smell of soap and a day-old hoodie and Travis; and this was really more than Nolan should have to deal with, Travis touching him and looking wide-eyed and intent, like he didn’t quite know what to do with the feel of Nolan’s skin under his hand.

“Get in bed, asshole.”

“Yeah, okay,” Travis said, but it still took him another second or two to move.

It took Nolan a long time to fall asleep after that, just lying in the dark and listening to the sound of Travis’s breath and the rustle of his body shifting against the sheets.

On Friday they worked their way down Travis’s redneck itinerary, which was a familiar rhythm of shooting skeet (Nolan won) (fine, Chase actually won, but Nolan beat Travis and that’s all he was going for) and bundling up in layers of coats to go sit out by the pond and stare at fishing lines. They got into an argument over the merits of fly versus pole fishing, loud enough to scare the actual fish that they were actually trying to catch, but whatever.

Saturday they piled back into the minivan for the drive back to Philly, and Travis did take him to a party with his high school buddies, this time. It was out in the suburbs somewhere, a big sprawling house with a tricked-out basement and a cover over the pool in the backyard; Nolan offered to DD for the drive home and so Travis got drunk, back on his old enemy Fireball and bouncing between Nolan (who was mowing through all the drunkies at beer-okay-he-was-drinking-water-instead pong, at least when he had a partner other than Travis’s drunk, hyper ass) and Lawson (who was trying to flirt with someone’s sister who’d come back from college _stupid hot_, in Travis’s exact words).

(She was pretty, sure. Tall and athletic, shiny brown curls and a big laugh. Nolan told Travis she was too tall for him; he laughed into Nolan’s arm and said, _hey maybe I like them tall_ and Nolan didn’t exactly know what to say to that.)

“Hey, buddy,” Travis said in the car. He was leaning against the door, eyes closed, but he’d been humming along to the dumb Top 40 shit on the radio and drumming his fingers along his thighs.

“What.”

“Why am I always the drunk one?”

“Dunno, Travis. Maybe ‘cause you drink more than me.” Nolan flicked the minivan’s turn signal and exited the highway, following the mechanical tones of his phone’s GPS back to Travis’s neighborhood.

“Why, though.” He blinked his eyes open, and Nolan should be paying attention to the road and not to him. “I thought all hockey players did was drink.”

“I drink plenty.”

“Yeah, but like, you’re always the one mopping me up.”

“It’s ‘cause I have more body mass,” he pointed out. “And I don’t mind,” he added, honest in spite of himself. “It’s mostly only when you drink Fireball.”

“You should have fun, though,” he grumbled, shutting his eyes again. “I like it better when you’re smiling.”

Nolan didn’t have anything to say after that, either; and from the way Travis’s fingers went still on his leg, mouth hanging open and shoulders gone boneless, he wouldn’t have heard it, anyway.

When they got back to campus, there were only two weeks until finals. It felt like simultaneously all the time in the world, and no time at all—far enough away that it was hard to motivate himself to study, but close enough that he felt like he should be in the library all the time, anyway.

Mostly it turned out that he and Travis sat around in their room, watching hockey with their laptops open. (Nolan had kind of meant to take some space after the break, finally take Mitch up on his offer to hang out or whatever, but then Travis just kept being around and it turned out that there wasn’t anyone he’d rather spend time with, so.) (And things were fine. None of the weird tense-hot staring-into-eyes shit.) (Even if Travis seemed to have forgotten that Nolan had personal space. At all. So they were like, touching a lot, in a way that wasn’t making Nolan lose his mind while Travis chugged along in blissful oblivion.) (Except for the way that Nolan caught Travis kind of—watching him, sometimes, in the gym or clowning around in the dining hall, but that was not actually chill and Nolan wasn’t dealing with it.) (So everything was fine and normal and the only thing on Nolan’s mind was his calc final.)

Ryanne filtered in and out, complaining that nobody was doing anything fun—not even Claude, who was studying for the LSAT or some other grad school thing that was not in keeping with his whole presentation. Although Nolan had to admit that he’d be a terrifying lawyer.

“Shit,” said Travis, as soon as Nolan had managed to get into a halfway decent groove with his bio study guide.

“God, _what_,” Nolan snapped.

Travis looked—actually stressed. He held up his phone. “Come here, dude.”

It was open to Instagram, a video of a familiar-looking hockey rink. Nolan recognized himself, doing an off-the-skate dangle on one of Travis’s buddies and firing a shot past the goalie, swinging around behind the goal and fist-bumping with Travis and Lawson. The caption was, _that time when @traviskonect4 brought a ringer to the pickup game! _

There were a few comments along the lines of _oh are you mad you got dunked on_, but then @leafsforlife98 popped up with _Dude that’s not a ringer I think that’s Nolan Patrick. Glad to see he’s back out there_ 👍

_Yeah and? I got his name_, Travis’s buddy wrote back.

@leafsforlife98 pasted in a link to a Sportsnet article that was 100% about Nolan Patrick’s decision to retire from pro hockey at age 17, and things escalated from there—an expanding ring of @s rippling through the hockey community of the Northeast, a _few holy shit dudes_, finally an _@traviskonect4 has been holding out on us!!! JFC this fucker has been drinking our beer all season @cgiroux28 @bigredclubhockey_ from @TheRealGhostBear.

“Fuck,” Nolan said, which was—really all he had to say.

“I’m so sorry,” Travis said. “I didn’t—I really wouldn’t have thought that—I know you’re trying to keep your situation low-key.”

“It’s not your fault.” Nolan let himself collapse back onto Travis’s bed, dragged a pillow over his face. It smelled like Travis, laundry detergent undercut with sweat. He didn’t know what he was feeling, exactly: some kind of sick, slithery twist in his stomach, shame and fear and all the shit he’d come here to get away from.

He’d known that it would get out, really, since he’d opened Travis’s Instagram way back in July and seen the hockey pictures; known that being just Nolan Patrick instead of Nolan Patrick, First Round Draft Pick…Except, had been doomed.

“Shit, G’s texting me,” Travis yelped, like his phone was burning his fingers, and threw it across the room. As if that was going to make any difference.

“It’s fine, bud.” He flailed a hand around until he hit Travis’s side. He was all tensed up; Nolan realized he was kind of—stroking Travis’s hip after he’d already started doing it, but then he didn’t stop because Travis was relaxing, slowly. “People were going to find out eventually.”

“But I’d want it to be ‘cause you told them,” Travis said. “Not because of some stupid shit on the Gram.”

“Instagram, somebody’s buddy at a tournament—I know this is hard for you to believe,” and Nolan poked him in the side, “but I was kinda a big deal, bud.”

“Maybe in _Canada_.” Nolan didn’t need to see Travis’s face to know he was smiling again, sun after rain.

“Oh, shut the _fuck_ up,” he said.

“I won’t let them say anything,” Travis told him, serious again. Nolan sometimes thought he’d get whiplash, trying to keep up with him, but at least it made life interesting, or some shit like that. “If anyone gives you shit, I’ll fucking kill ‘em. You know you’re my ride or die, babe.”

Nolan said, still muffled by the pillow, “I thought Lawson was your ride or die.”

Travis smacked him in the stomach. “You’re different.”

He came back from practice looking—tense, lines across his forehead and eyes gone a little squinty.

“Okay there, bud?” Nolan was done studying for bio and had moved on to staring at YouTube, trying to distract himself from the fact that he had an unread text from Tan 🏒 ner 🏒Kas 🏒 pick.

“Yeah I fucking hate everyone and it’s great.” Travis dropped his gear bag in the middle of the floor and made a beeline for—okay, Nolan’s bed. Sure, great, the thing he needed was for Travis to sit next to him and then kind of—curl into his shoulder, close enough that Nolan’s nose was brushing the fabric of his toque. It was…soft, and there wasn’t really space for both of them but Travis seemed to be trying to compensate by climbing inside his skin. So that was happening, okay.

Nolan shut his laptop to give himself something to do with his hands, other than slipping one under Travis’s toque and getting a handful of his hair. He shouldn’t want to touch Travis’s hair, anyway: it was probably greasy, probably didn’t smell great after a quick sluice in the showers at the rink.

He settled for wrapping an arm around his shoulders, instead. Travis sighed into his neck and relaxed, and told him how mad everyone was on the team, how they’d all been joking like they didn’t care if Nolan played or not but that it wasn’t cool how it had been some big secret.

“Fuck ‘em, eh,” Nolan offered. He hadn’t been in a fight since the ‘Dub, obviously, but he figured he could make an exception and go beat in some of these assholes’ faces. If they were mad at him, they could deal with Nolan; taking it out on Travis was shitty, and Nolan didn’t like it, he thought, with a protective surge that he’d only felt when some goon had been fucking with his goalie.

“Yeah, okay.” He could feel Travis smiling, not one of his real smiles but as close as he was likely to get. “You and me against the world.”

“Got it, bud,” he agreed.

“So,” Ryanne said, smiling at him across their library table after class the next day. But not like, a nice smile. “Secrets.”

“I told you I played hockey.”

“But not like. The extent to which you played hockey.”

“I didn’t want it to be a thing.”

“Congrats, babe,” she told him. “You made it a thing.”

“Whatever.” He slouched lower in his chair and scrawled a couple of numbers onto his calc problem set. “I wanted a fresh start, okay. And it’s not like you ever asked about it.”

“Be-_cause_,” she said, really drawing out the second syllable, “whenever I asked you about high school you mumbled some shit about your senior year and got weird. I figured you were just a huge loser.”

“Thanks.”

“If the shoe fits.”

“I mean,” Nolan said. “It doesn’t really matter, though. Nobody here gives a shit about hockey.”

“There are articles,” she said, “written about you. On the Internet. So _someone_ gives a shit.”

“Did you read any of the comment sections?” he asked, angry all of a sudden and seeing no reason to hide it. “Maybe go check a few out, before you ask me why I wanted to put all that shit behind me. Maybe go watch a few old dudes in suits go on TV and talk about how I was too soft to make it in the NHL, how kids these days are too weak to keep going when the going gets tough. Do you even know how many times I’ve had surgery? _Six_. Six fucking times, and I’m eighteen fucking years old. I can barely walk down a fucking street in my hometown without watching people fucking _pity_ me. And God forbid someone figures out I’m _gay_ on top of all of that, then it’s fucking, whatever, proof of some real _fucked-up shit_,” he spat out, realizing once he was done that his voice had risen. People at the next few tables over were staring. He slammed his notebook shut, shoved it in his backpack, and left. 

He went straight to the gym and cranked up the treadmill until his body was screaming too hard for him to be able to pay attention to anything else.

Travis was gone when he got back to the room, which was for the best: Nolan didn’t feel fit for human company, and he was not unaware (courtesy of his sisters telling him for the last decade) that he tended to take shit out on the people around him.

Travis had left a note on the stupid whiteboard he’d stuck to their door, though, way back in August; he was at his study group for accounting. Other than Carter, Travis was the only person who ever wrote on theirs—the rest of the guys on their hall seemed to communicate via in-jokes and Greek letters and references to parties that Nolan was never going to go to. It was maybe what it had been like in Brandon, whenever the Wheat Kings rolled up to the movie theater or went to shoot pool; except now he was on the outside, with no desire to look in.

“You’re still up,” Travis said when he got back. Nolan was in bed with his laptop, headphones on and doing his best to pretend he didn’t exist. Travis slung his backpack onto his desk chair and climbed into bed next to him, shoving at Nolan’s shoulder until he moved over. “What are you watching?”

It was some stupid police procedural, the kind of shit Travis definitely hated so Nolan mumbled that he only watched them when he was stressed out: because his mom liked them and fucking whatever, Law and Order made him think of being like, nine years old and lying on the couch with his head in her lap when he was home sick from school. Like, calming, or whatever the fuck, and he would absolutely annihilate Travis if he ever told anyone.

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” he said, tugging Nolan’s headphones out of the jack on his laptop and settling himself more comfortably on Nolan’s shoulder.

The hockey team had a party that weekend. Except instead of drinking beer in Claude’s house, they had been ordered to put on suits and bring dates to some venue in the city. Travis had been given an exclusion for Nolan, whether because of the dumbass drama or because Captain Resting Bitchface wanted to see what kind of girl would agree to go on a date with Travis Konecny.

“Do you even own a suit, bro,” Nolan asked him, the night of the semiformal.

“Fucking duh,” Travis said. “I’m not an animal.”

Nolan had left all his suits in Winnipeg, so he guessed he _was_ an animal—but it’s not like it mattered, since he had a hot date with his Calc textbook. He was getting a B in that bitch or he was going to die trying.

Travis, on the other hand, was taking another shot at Carter’s elf girl’s roommate.

“Is she even real, bro.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Travis was stripping off his track pants and t-shirt, and Nolan was looking at his phone instead of the lines of muscle running down his back. “I’ve met her with Carts,” he said into his closet, before emerging with a suit bag that he chucked onto his bed. “She’s cute.”

“Is she,” said Nolan, who may or may not have stalked her on Instagram, her happy-Thanksgiving-I’m-so-grateful post and a picture of her hugging a fluffy white cat.

“Not really my first choice, but.” He shrugged, standing there between their two freshman dorm beds, wearing navy blue boxer briefs and a crucifix on a gold chain. Nolan kept his eyes fixed carefully on his phone, although he had absolutely no clue what Tanner’s text said; Travis was still standing there, hands on his hips.

Nolan finally said, “Great attitude, bro,” since it seemed like Travis was waiting for something.

Travis sighed and unzipped his suit bag. Nolan was honestly curious to see what type of suit Travis Konecny would own—his money was on some oversized trash bag from high school prom—but instead it was slim, gray, and well-tailored, and the pants made his hips look way too narrow and his ass look way too good. Nolan did not pay attention to the crisp white line of his shirt against the November tan of his throat.

He did pay attention to his camo tie, though.

“Bro.”

“What?” Travis was standing in front of the mirror, lips moving as he carefully went through the motions to deal with his tie.

“Why the fuck do you have a camo tie.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He snugged it up to his throat and spun, giving Nolan a brilliant grin. “Gotta keep some of the personality going, dude.”

“You’re from the middle of Philadelphia.”

“But not like, _spiritually_,” Travis said, like that was some kind of answer. “And it’s a low-key camo. Like, _fashion_ camo. Get some, bud.”

Nolan repeated the phrase _fashion camo_ to himself, quietly, so he didn’t scream; then admitted to Travis that he didn’t actually know how to tie a tie, because he figured he’d learn for the draft and then that never happened, so.

“I’ll teach ya.” Travis bounced over, ruffled up Nolan’s hair for absolutely no reason at all. He was close enough that Nolan could tell he’d avoided the peak eighteen-year-old move of dousing himself in Axe, and this was, once again, more than he should be forced to put up with on a regular basis. Apropos of absolutely fucking nothing, Travis added, “I bet you’re bad at dancing—I can help you with that, too.”

“I don’t dance, so. No thanks.”

“Come on, Nols.” He shimmied his hips to whatever dumbass song was playing out of his laptop speakers.

“No.”

“Come onnnn, you gotta be ready for whatever weird-ass semiformal the Outdoors Club is gonna have.”

“We don’t have one. I checked before I joined.”

“God, you’re so fucking boring,” Travis sighed. “It’s a good thing you’re not my date, after all.”

Nolan smacked his hip and things devolved a little, at least until Travis’s phone rang—Carter, wondering where the fuck he was since they were supposed to meet ten minutes ago—so he was still laughing when he scrambled out the door, shooting Nolan finger-guns from the doorway and accepting the whoops and wolf whistles from the guys out in the common room. (Unlike Nolan, he got along with them, mostly. He said he’d gone to private school, so he had plenty of practice at rich dickheads with coke problems.)

Nolan shut the door behind him, cracked his knuckles, and opened his textbook. He would never admit this to anyone, but he found math kind of soothing. It was predictable, and followed tidy patterns across the pages of his textbook and his notebook. Nothing like real life.

Travis wasn’t back when he went to bed—one or two, he kind of lost track of time, but either way he was asleep when the door banged open, letting in a slice of light from the hall.

“What the fuck?” he asked, stuck somewhere between sleep-blurred and the startled acceleration of his heart rate.

Travis stepped inside and kicked the door shut. All the lights were off, and he didn’t even have his phone out, but Nolan could see the outline of his shoulders, a shadow moving as he shrugged out of his suit jacket, dropped his precious camo tie on the floor.

“Trav, what the fuck,” Nolan repeated, rubbing at his eyes and reaching for his lamp.

“I,” said Travis. He kicked off his shoes, blinking in the light. “Want you to know that I’m not that drunk.”

“Aren’t you? ‘Cause bud. What the fuck are you doing.”

“Taking my shirt off,” he answered, like it was obvious. The shirt joined the camo tie on the floor, a crumple of white fabric. His belt followed, then his suit pants, and he was standing there in the middle of their dorm room, in a white undershirt and his underwear and black socks. His jaw was set and he had the same determined squint around his eyes that he got when he was getting frustrated by Nolan, or his accounting homework, or Nolan’s attempts to help him with his accounting homework, but he was sticking with it anyway.

“I see that,” Nolan said. “Why are you doing it so—loudly, though.”

He said, “Because I’m sick of fucking _wondering_.”

And then he was putting a knee on Nolan’s bed, climbing up and settling himself in Nolan’s lap. He was taller from that angle. Nolan didn’t know where to put his hands or where to look; he felt like he was still asleep, like this was some random dream that he was going to wake up from any minute, achingly hard with the memory of Travis’s weight across his thighs. But his sleeping brain probably wouldn’t have given him the smell of beer on Travis’s breath, or the way Travis didn’t seem to know where to put his hands, either, starting out at his wrists then trailing up his arms to settle on his shoulders.

“If you’re going to punch me, please be gentle,” he said, which was totally fucking nonsensical except that, _oh_, he was leaning forward and they were—kissing? Travis was kissing _him_, actually, and Nolan was sitting there with his eyes open and his mouth frozen like some kind of panicked virgin.

“Shit,” Travis said after another second or two, sitting back on his heels and wincing. “Sorry. Yeah, I lied before, I’m actually blackout right now, so—”

“Stop.”

Travis stopped, hands halfway off Nolan’s shoulders with his eyes flickering between Nolan’s face and the institutional white wall behind his shoulder. Whether from Nolan telling him to stop, or from the belated hand that he’d put on his hip, one finger touching the strip of skin between his undershirt and his briefs.

“What do you, uh, mean by ‘stop,’ ‘cause I could take that a couple of ways and—”

“Jesus Christ, _shut up_.” Nolan tightened his hand on Travis’s hip and pulled him in to kiss him properly, tonguing at his lower lip and swallowing his shocky gasp. Travis went from stiff and unresponsive to all the way into it in a second, wrapping his arms around Nolan’s neck and wriggling in closer like he was trying to climb inside Nolan’s skin. He was hot under Nolan’s palms and yeah, he really was not wearing much in the way of clothing—there was nothing to stop Nolan from getting a hand inside his undershirt, from running his thumb over the cuts of muscle along his sides. That made Travis twitch and shiver, hiss _fuck you I’m ticklish_, into his mouth even if he wasn’t trying to go anywhere except closer; and Travis was going to regret telling him that because there was no world where Nolan wasn’t going to use that against him later, but right now he’d rather lick his way into Travis’s mouth, let their tongues get all tangled together while Travis wriggled around on his lap.

Of course he wouldn’t stop moving, hands going everywhere—Nolan’s hair, tracing along his throat, holding onto his jaw to change their angle.

Nolan wanted to tie him down and watch him go absolutely out of his fucking mind, which he knew was too intense; knew it, could know it, wasn’t going to do anything about it other than bite Travis’s lower lip and feel the way it made his hips rock forward. He was into it, for sure, no way to hide that when he was in Nolan’s lap in his goddamned underwear, plastered up against his chest and panting into his mouth.

Travis was fumbling at the hem of Nolan’s sweatshirt with one hand, the other one still twisted up in his hair. “Take this off, I want to touch you.”

Nolan didn’t know what to do with that, other than strip off his shirt and throw it out of the way. Then Travis’s hands went everywhere, a little tentative at first as he skated them across Nolan’s shoulder blades, the muscles in his arms and the hard lines of his hips; then more confident, using his fingernails and flicking his thumbnail against Nolan’s nipple.

Nolan wanted to flip them over, pin him to the bed and wreck him, but he made himself stay where he was, let Travis suck on his tongue and grind up against his abs like he didn’t even know what his hips were doing. Travis had to be able to tell how hard Nolan was; he had on sweatpants, a couple of layers of blankets, but Travis’s ass was _right there_, grinding down onto him every time he thrust. Travis’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was gasping into Nolan’s ear, hanging onto his shoulders and making this little whining noise and it was too much; it was just absolutely fucking too much.

“Can I,” he managed to get out.

“Fuck, yes, anything,” and Travis should not have said that, when he didn’t know all the shit Nolan wanted to do to him; but then again he’d stripped basically naked and climbed into Nolan’s lap and kissed him, so it wasn’t like he was a total innocent, and that was the line Nolan was going with as he pulled off Travis’s shirt, grabbed his ass and got him exactly where he wanted him. Travis made a shocked noise and shoved even closer, arms around Nolan’s neck and legs wrapping around his waist. Nolan bit at his ear, at his collarbone, whatever he could reach, and they were smashed so close together that he didn’t know how Travis was finding the space to keep moving but he was, restless hands with just a hint of fingernails; and of course he wasn’t shutting up, either, panting curses and nonsense noises into Nolan’s mouth.

Nolan could tell that he was flushing all over, whether it was because of his stupid blush or because Travis was radiating heat everywhere they were touching, skin going slick with sweat and damp where the head of his dick was grinding against Nolan’s abs. He squeezed Travis’s ass harder, heard the tenor of his noises kick up a notch until they resolved themselves into the words _fuck_ and _I’m so close_ and _I need you to make me come_ and that was it, that was actually the last shred of Nolan’s self-control evaporating.

He flipped them, Travis’s shoulders hitting the mattress facing towards the foot of his bed, Nolan landing halfway on top of him and getting a hand inside his underwear. Four fast strokes and that was it, Travis biting his shoulder and scratching the hell out of his back and making more noise than they should be making in their dorm room, but Nolan would be fucked if he cared.

Nolan sat back on his heels when Travis was done, shoved his sweatpants down far enough to get his dick out, and came all over Travis’s chest. Twitched when Travis ran a finger through his come and licked it off.

“You’re filthy,” was all Nolan could come up with, when he’d gotten the power of speech back. It was true: literally and figuratively.

Travis wrinkled his nose and pulled Nolan’s sweatshirt out from under his hip, used it to wipe at the mess on his stomach and chest. “Yeah, well, you obviously didn’t enjoy that at all, so.” His forehead was a little scrunched up, but he mostly looked pleased with himself, the little fucker. He’d probably left toothmarks in Nolan’s shoulder. “Besides, you’re the one that’s into weird shit, not me.” He fluttered his eyelashes and tried to look innocent, which was unsuccessful.

“Oh my god.” Nolan collapsed on top of him; hopefully Travis’s squeak when Nolan let his full bodyweight slam into his chest was the end of his life, and Nolan’s suffering, but if he couldn’t have that, he guessed he would take the way Travis was petting his hair, like even post-orgasm he had to have something to do with his hands.

“So,” said Travis, tentatively, after a while. Nolan could feel him tensing up against his chest.

“Shut the fuck up and go to sleep,” Nolan ordered. Things could be messy in the morning, but right now his eyes were shut and he felt no particular need to do anything about—anything.

“Uh, okay.” Travis relaxed, one slow muscle group at a time. “Are you sure—”

“If you’re talking,” Nolan said into his hair, “you aren’t sleeping.”

“Maybe I talk in my sleep,” because if Nolan had learned one thing about Travis, it was that he wanted to fight about everything, all of the time; but he shut up after that, which was really all Nolan cared about.

(Other than getting the last word, which was _don’t_, as in, “No you fucking don’t.”)

Nolan came awake by degrees the next morning, and then all at once. They’d shifted overnight, so that Nolan was basically spooning Travis and Travis was cutting off the circulation in his right arm, again. He was still asleep, from the slow, steady metronome of his breath, and they were still the wrong way on the bed with Nolan’s lamp turned on, even though they must have gotten under the covers at some point.

And they were so tangled up that there was no way for Nolan to move without waking him up; so he didn’t think anyone could blame him for the fact that he just—didn’t, that he instead let himself lie there with his nose in Travis’s hair, while the sky outside their window got lighter and the angle of the shadows changed against the wall. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Travis to wake up, or maybe it was; right now he was warm, and comfortable enough, and it wasn’t exactly easy to ignore the knots of nerves and anxiety and _oh shit what the fuck did we do_ twisting themselves around in his stomach, but it was easier than dealing with whatever came next.

Travis couldn’t sleep forever, though, and eventually he started to shift around, make the little inquisitive noises that Nolan knew would transition him into the land of the waking.

He knew Travis was awake when he felt every muscle in his body tense back up, felt it like a punch in the gut.

“Nols,” he whispered, though, and then that fucking weirdo poked him in the arm. Once, then again, until Nolan snapped “_Ouch_, what the fuck,” which was not what he thought he’d be saying, first thing in the morning.

“Sorry, shit, I’m sorry?” Travis said, still whispering for some fucking reason. He twisted himself around so they were looking at each other face-on. His eyes were usually crinkled up and halfway shut when he was waking up, at least until he’d stolen a cup of Nolan’s coffee, but right now they were wide open. Nolan still couldn’t have said what color they were, exactly, even though they were nose-to-nose, close enough that he could smell Travis’s hungover morning breath. “I didn’t think you were real.”

“What,” was all Nolan felt like he could say.

“Like, that it was a dream. You know?”

Nolan shook his head, fractionally, even though he did.

“I didn’t—” Travis frowned; Nolan wanted to kiss the wrinkles out of his forehead. None of this was going the way he thought it would. They were still close and warm under the blankets, and if anything Travis seemed to be trying to press himself in even tighter, sliding a cautious hand up his side, tucking his head under Nolan’s chin. “I didn’t know. How it would go. If you were—or if I was. Really.”

“If you’re what,” Nolan asked into Travis’s hair, because one way or another, he needed to know.

“I don’t know, okay,” he said, in a small voice, but his arm tightened over Nolan’s back and it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere.

Nolan shut his eyes, collected himself. “I am.”

“Fuck, are you kidding?” Travis asked, like this was somehow a surprise, when they were _naked_ in _Nolan’s bed_.

“Definitely not.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice had gone quiet again, lips moving against Nolan’s collarbone.

Nolan thought about it, through the pins and needles making themselves felt in his arm, through the smell of Travis’s hair—he’d put some kind of product in it, the night before, or maybe Carter had after he’d left their room—and the post-alcoholic flavor threaded through his sweat. “At first I hated you,” was what he came up with. “Then, I don’t know. I didn’t want things to—change. Didn’t think you’d be into it, anyway.”

“I guess I’m into it.”

“You don’t have to be,” Nolan said. “If you don’t want to be.” He tugged Travis out of his neck by his hair, because he wanted to see him for this.

His face was all scrunched up, but he managed to pull out half of his crooked smile. “I think I want to be, though.”

“Okay,” Nolan said, and Travis laughed, said _just okay_? and leaned forward to kiss him again.

They went to breakfast, and to the gym, and everything was absolutely normal except that Travis stood a hair closer, that Nolan watched the muscles flex in his back when he finished his set of pushups and knew exactly what they felt like under his hands; that he had this, whatever, this _awareness_ now.

And then there was the part where Travis—an actual demon—slid into his shower stall back in the dorm and jerked him off in the water and the steam, quieter than he’d been the night before because he had to be, because anyone could walk into the bathroom literally any second.

Nolan could tell it was killing him, from the way he was biting his lip; the way he bit _Nolan’s_ lip when it was his turn to come, hard enough to hurt, and from the choked-off little noises Travis couldn’t quite seem to help himself from making.

It turned out that it absolutely did it for him, which was unfortunate because Nolan really needed to be studying for calc.

But instead he ended up locking the door behind them, picking Travis up with a hand under his ass, and pitching him onto his bed even though they were both still dripping wet.

“Holy shit, that shouldn’t be hot,” Travis said into his mouth. “I should not be into that.”

“You can be into whatever you want.” Nolan was more interested in kissing down along his neck than talking, though, and getting his hand under the towel Travis had wrapped around his hips, low enough to hint at the thatch of dark hair around his dick.

“You too, Nols. But just so you know, I’m not doing any of your weird Canadian shit.”

“Jesus Christ, Travis.”

“I told you before, I’m a good Catholic boy.”

He could hear the grin in Travis’s voice, so he pinched his hip in retaliation. Travis twitched and yeah, so did his dick, which was halfway hard again already. “I thought you said you were over that,” Nolan said, letting his fingers skate themselves down the inside of Travis’s hip.

“I probably still have some stuff to work out.” Travis’s voice was going all breathy, though, the closer Nolan’s hand got to his dick. “Do you think I should _mphmm_,” was what he said next, because Nolan kissed him halfway through. That wasn’t enough to get him to stop talking, though—nothing was, probably, except a gag, which was. A thought.

No matter what Travis said, Nolan had always felt like he was pretty vanilla. But there was something about Travis that made Nolan want to just—fuck him up.

“Do you ever shut up,” he said experimentally, into Travis’s throat.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you try and make me?”

Nolan was fucked. He was so, so fucked, and even though he’d gotten off like ten minutes before he was already hard enough to pound nails. “You want that?”

“I think so, maybe. Yeah,” Travis answered, like he was really thinking about it. 

Like, damn, like he’d _thought about it_.

Nolan pushed himself up on an elbow. There was Travis’s face, a little flushed—not like Nolan got, but there was some color in his cheeks for sure—with sweat popping out along his hairline. His chin was back in that determined set and his lower lip was chapped when Nolan swiped his thumb across it, catching at the skin on his fingerprint. Slowly, deliberately, holding eye contact the whole time like he was worried Nolan was going to _misinterpret_ that shit, he licked Nolan’s thumb, where it was pushing into his bottom lip.

“Fuck. Trav—”

He raised an eyebrow. “So are you going to make me, or what.”

Nolan didn’t know—to be totally honest, didn’t want to find out—if he had enough self-control to keep himself from fucking Travis’s face, if he let his dick get anywhere near it.

So instead he settled for shoving two fingers in his mouth and then biting his way down Travis’s chest. He spent a lot of time on his nipples when he found out how letting his teeth catch made Travis’s hips twitch, made him suck harder on Nolan’s fingers.

Nolan needed his hand back, though, when he got his mouth on Travis’s cock and Travis thrust up, hard enough to make him gag. Nolan pinned an arm across his hips and used the other to jack him while he got his gag reflex under control, lightly enough to make him whimper and try to fuck up into his hand.

“Sorry, sorry,” he panted, “you just look so fucking hot down there and—”

“Stay still,” Nolan ordered, pushing down with his arm. Travis shivered all over, leaking precome and whining when Nolan swallowed him back down. Travis pushed up against his arm like he wanted to see how far Nolan would let him go, like he couldn’t help himself.

At least he warned Nolan before he came, digging his fingernails into his shoulder and shaking through it and not quite managing to stay quiet this time, either. Nolan licked his lips, kissed the inside of Travis’s hipbone while Travis ran his fingers through his hair.

“Holy shit. You’re really fucking good at that.”

“Practice makes perfect, bud.”

Travis tightened his fingers in Nolan’s hair, pulled him back up his chest. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

Travis blinked up at him, frowned. “I don’t love that, dude.”

“What, getting blowjobs?” He was unbelievable.

“Thinking about you with other people.” Travis wrapped a leg around his hips, started letting his free hand wander down Nolan’s side. “So, like. Are you doing that? Because I don’t think I want to.”

“Are we really talking about this right now,” Nolan asked, just to be sure he knew what was happening. Since they’d been fucking for like, less than 24 hours. Maybe 14, max, and Travis hadn’t even been able to make himself say the word _gay_ (or bi, or whatever he was) that morning.

“Yeah, why not.” Travis kissed along his jaw, getting his hand going into a rhythm; stopped, briefly, to spit into his palm and start again. Then stopped a second time, shoving Nolan out of the way to fumble at a bottle of hand lotion in the drawer of his nightstand. Nolan dropped his forehead onto the pillow and groaned, both because everything had gone smooth and hot, and because he was thinking about why Travis would have that lotion next to his bed. When he would have used it, what he would have looked like when he did.

And maybe Travis had no manners in bed, but that didn’t keep him from giving an A+ handie once he got his rhythm going. Helped, maybe, since he whispered truly filthy shit in Nolan’s ear the entire time, voice getting down into his stomach and pulling Nolan’s orgasm out of him, right in time to the slick glide of his hand.

“So were you gonna answer, or,” he asked, before Nolan had even begun to catch his breath.

“Jesus, give me a minute.”

“No. This is a one-time offer.”

“That’s dirty fucking pool.”

“Don’t care.” Travis settled Nolan into a better position on his shoulder. Kissed his hair, wiped his come off onto the sheets. One of them was going to have to do laundry (which meant that Nolan was going to have to do laundry), and Travis was the worst. “Clock is ticking, bud.”

“Fuck you, okay,” but it turned out that there wasn’t anyone else at this goddamned school he would rather be fucking, so. There it was.

“If I get a C in calc, it’s your fault,” Nolan told Travis a few days later. They were in the library studying. Allegedly—Nolan’s calc final was in the morning, and Travis had something due for his freshman comp class, and they should definitely be working but instead Travis kept cuddling up against his shoulder, showing him dumb shit on his phone and hooking their ankles together and letting his fingers drift way, _way_ too high onto the inside of Nolan’s leg. He was wearing sweatpants and they were in a public place, Jesus Christ.

“I’m not doing anything,” Travis said, which was not a factually accurate statement: his hand was, by Nolan’s most generous estimate, one single centimeter away from his dick. Nolan grabbed his wrist under the table.

“You’re such a fucking liar.” He could feel himself blushing, too, which made it even worse.

“We could always take a break.”

“You wanted to take a break ten minutes ago.”

“Yeah, and you wouldn’t let me. So now it’s been like, twenty.”

“How many words have you written?” Nolan asked. “How close are you to being done with your paper?”

“Close enough.” He tugged his hand free and resettled his toque on his head. “I can finish it in the morning.”

“It’s due at 9.”

“Shut up, I don’t want your facts,” he moaned, dropping his head onto the library table and looking up at Nolan with one blue-green eye. “I want you to take me into that microfiche room in the basement that nobody goes into and—”

“Boys,” said Captain Resting Bitchface. He had a stack of LSAT study guides under his arm. It was the first time Nolan had seen him since he got Instagram outed.

“G,” said Travis. “What’s up,” he said, like he hadn’t just been asking Nolan to blow him in a semi-public room. Nolan knew he was still blushing, which was great. Just great. He tried to focus on his calc problems while Travis and Claude shot the shit about practice the day before, but it was useless since Claude kept—asking him things. About drills, and their special teams, and fucking _hockey_, and before he knew it he was actually participating in the conversation. That was weird, okay; he didn’t talk to anyone about hockey anymore, really, other than Travis and occasionally his uncle, because Uncle James couldn’t help himself.

But there he was, shooting the shit about the conditioning schedules Claude would be handing out for winter break. Even agreeing to take a look at them, let Claude know if he had any thoughts.

And it was—fine, actually.

“I thought everyone on the team was mad at me,” Nolan said, once Claude had ambled off to dinner with Ryanne. “For drinking their beer all year and not playing, or whatever.”

“Oh, I, uh.” Travis looked very intently at his laptop and started typing.

Nolan kicked his ankle. “What did you do, Trav.”

“I maybe kind of yelled at everyone,” he told his screen. “For like, a while, at practice the other day. And told them how shitty they were being. And then G kind of thought about it and like—agreed. So. It’s fine. They’re all probably going to start asking you to spill the tea on everyone you know in the NHL.”

Nolan didn’t really have anything to say to that. Travis kept looking at his laptop and typing, so Nolan figured they were done talking and they could focus on school for like, a second; but when he glanced over, Travis was firing off tweets about the Eagles. His forehead was wrinkled in concentration, his teeth were set in his lower lip, and his fingers were flying across the keyboard.

And, fuck it.

“Wanna go,” and he stopped, because he didn’t know how to verbalize what he was about to say.

“Go what?” Travis was really into whatever Twitter flame war he’d almost certainly started.

Nolan managed to mumble something about the basement.

At least that got his attention.

Nolan’s calc exam went okay, and Travis got his comp paper turned in, and somehow Nolan hadn’t realized how much _space_ there would be in his schedule during finals. Like, sure, yes, he was supposed to be studying every hour of every day—his bio class was not a joke—but in reality he could only stare at his notes for so long before his eyes glazed over.

At least he could focus longer than Travis could.

“Shut up and study,” he ordered.

“Make me,” Travis shot back. He was narrating whatever dumb-fuck game he was playing on his phone, instead of working on practice problems for his accounting class.

“Dude, you’re scary,” said Carter. They were in Carter’s common room, because his hallmates weren’t terrible and Nolan was running out of places to study where Travis couldn’t turn it into a sex thing. Nolan wasn’t sure he could even get a boner within a twenty-foot radius of all the like, purity that Carter radiated. 

“I’m immune,” Travis said to his phone. “His scowly mean mug doesn’t work on me anymore.”

“You’re going to fail your fucking class, dude.” He’d seen Travis’s problem sets. They were—not good.

“I don’t fucking care, okay?” He slapped his phone down on the table. “I fucking hate that class and everyone in the business pre-reqs is a douchebag and I think I want to change my major so it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

“You don’t wanna tank your GPA, bro,” said Carter, gently.

If Nolan had said that, Travis would have gotten up in his face or stormed out, but instead his shoulders just slumped and he set his forehead down on the table. “Ugh, I just need a major where I can actually pay off my loans, you know? And I don’t know what the fuck else to do.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Nolan said, trying to echo Carter’s soft-as-hell tone of voice and probably failing. “It’s just the first semester.” He knocked their ankles together under the table, though, and did his best to try to explain accounting (a class he’d never taken) to Travis (a person who was extremely bad at math).

They still ended up screaming at each other—Carter rolled his eyes and stuck in a pair of headphones, with a parting shot of _hey TK, have you thought about going to your professor’s office hours_ because he was extremely responsible—but it was normal screaming, not my-life-is-falling-apart screaming, so that was fine.

It was dark when they walked back to their dorm, and starting to rain a little bit. The mist made yellow halos around the streetlights lining the quad. Everyone had their heads down, hoods up, hurrying to get wherever they were going.

“Hey,” Nolan said.

“What?” Travis hadn’t brought a coat, so he was huddled into his sweatshirt, nothing visible but the end of his nose and a highlight along his cheekbone.

“You’re gonna get it figured out, okay.”

He tilted his head and gave Nolan a tired half-smile. “Hope so.”

“Really.” Nolan hooked an arm around his neck and pulled Travis into his side; left it there, so they walked into their hall still all pressed together, and that didn’t change when Travis shut the door to their room behind them and pulled Nolan down onto his bed.

The schedule at the gym was all turned around for finals, so Nolan shouldn’t have been surprised when Max strolled in the day before his bio exam. He was at the swipe desk with Mitch; they were trying not to be obvious about having their textbooks out, and Nolan was also trying not to freak out about how terrifying Mitch’s study guide for Musculoskeletal Anatomy looked, because that shit was in his future and he was not excited about it.

“It’s fine, dawg,” Mitch assured him. “If you can pass the Human Anatomy and Physiology sequence, this shit is cake.”

“What if I don’t pass it, though.”

“I guess you find another major then?” Mitch was the least reassuring person in the world. But he also seemed like a complete dumbass, so if he could make it to his junior year in kinesiology, Nolan could, too—and that was the only thing he was thinking about when Max walked up.

He nodded to Mitch (who greeted him by name with his characteristic big-toothed grin) and kind of—sneered at Nolan. Which, okay.

“How’re things, dude,” Mitch asked him, oblivious while he swiped Max’s ID.

“You know. End of the semester. Thinking about life lessons and shit.”

“Oh, bet?” Mitch handed back his ID card.

“Never fuck with a closet case, baby gay.” He stared Nolan straight in the eye when he said it.

“Oh wow,” said Mitch. “I really prefer to think we’re all on our own journeys, you know? And that it’s like, deeply un-chill to pressure people about coming out before they’re ready. But like, yeah, you probably know a lot more than me about how to be gay ‘cause you’re like, in grad school right? Even though you’re still hitting on undergrads, so. I hope you have the _best_ workout. Because it’s like, really important for senior citizens to maintain their core strength and mobility. So. Yeah. Bye.”

His dipshit grin didn’t flicker, and he used the exact same peppy, upbeat voice as when he encouraged people to _attack the hill!_ and _love the burn!_ in his spin classes. Mitch Marner being the peppiest character assassin on campus was just—not something Nolan had expected to have to fit into his worldview, when he woke up this morning.

“I, uh,” he attempted.

Mitch rolled his eyes and threw a flashcard at him. “Don’t worry about it. Your secret is safe with me.”

“It’s uh, not a secret.”

“Huh.” He tilted his head one way, then another. Shrugged, grinned again. “Yeah, sure. I hate bullies and Max is kind of not my _fav_ person in our little community, so. Did he want to be able to fuck other people, but still have you on tap like, 24/7? Because I hear that’s a move.”

“I mean, I kind of ghosted him, so.”

“He probably deserved it.” Mitch flicked through a couple of flashcards. “But, baby gay, maybe don’t ghost people? It’s rude.”

Nolan walked into their room and proceeded directly to flopping face-first onto Travis’s bed, because it was closer to the door and not because he thought Travis’s smell was like, comforting or some bullshit like that. “I had a really weird shift,” he told the pillow.

He felt the mattress dip when Travis sat down by his hip, then rested a hand on his lower back. “Yeah? Too many frat stars?”

“I wish.” He thought about what, exactly, he was going to tell Travis and his possessive little lizard brain. Mumbled an abbreviated version into the pillow, because if he couldn’t see Travis, maybe it wouldn’t count; and Travis’s hand didn’t move, anyway, stayed right where it was with his thumb making steady arcs across the back of his coat.

“I knew that guy was a douchebag,” was Travis’s verdict. He kissed the back of Nolan’s neck, mouth all warm and soft. “Good thing you upgraded yourself.”

“_Are_ you an upgrade, though,” he mumbled into the pillow.

Travis bit his neck, hard enough that Nolan could feel it uncurling something in his lower belly. “I’ll show _you_ an upgrade.”

Nolan didn’t even bother protesting that he had to study, because Travis was pushing him over onto his back, nosing at the front of the stupid khaki pants he had to wear to work. And that was new, the contrast between the confident pull of Travis’s hand, and _Jesus_: the wet heat of his mouth, how he didn’t know how to keep his teeth all the way out of it but how he wasn’t letting that get in his way, either. Nolan sucking the taste of his skin off Travis’s tongue, hearing him pant out _goddamn I didn’t know how hot that would be, I didn’t know_ when Nolan was getting him off, barely enough time to get a rhythm going before he was coming all over Nolan’s abs. 

Two days later, they were done with their first semester of college and Travis had mostly learned how to un-involve his teeth from blowjobs.

The entire semester had been a fucking trip, actually, when Nolan thought about it—there was no way he would have imagined himself leaning up against his shitty pine headboard with Travis’s back against his chest, watching Talladega Nights and muffling laughter into his hair. They were supposed to be going out soon, to some end-of-the-semester party at Mitch’s, but neither of them seemed to be making any efforts to move.

“It might be like, a gay thing,” Nolan had tried to explain earlier, in case Travis wanted to back out or—whatever.

“Really,” Travis had said, while he was licking at the inside of Nolan’s left hipbone. “I dunno, but I think I could—maybe—just maybe—be into that.”

“Are you sure, though,” Nolan had asked. He’d only meant to ask about going to the party, but it ended up coming out a little differently, a little needy, not a tone of voice that he was used to hearing himself use.

“I’m sure,” Travis said, calm and confident like he’d thought about it.

It didn’t turn out to be a gay thing, just a Mitch thing—so the drinks were rainbow-colored, mostly smelled like Malibu, and tasted like the regrets Nolan was going to have in the morning, because rum gave him the worst hangovers. But it was a mix of random coworkers from the gym and Mitch’s buddies from his like, eighteen different intramural sports teams. Including one called Rainbow Flag Basketball: they were all wearing rainbow tie-dyed t-shirts, and they were definitely gay.

The captain eyed Nolan when they walked in, slid up next to him by the bucket of red punch, and asked if he played basketball.

So joining the gay IM basketball team was a thing he could do, maybe.

“Why didn’t she ask _me_,” Travis bitched into his cup of blue punch.

“You’re short.”

“Mitch is _two inches_ taller than me.”

“_Mitch_ is six feet tall.”

“He’s a fucking _twig_.”

“You can’t teach reach, babe,” Nolan told him. Travis elbowed him in the side and Nolan shoved his face into the living room wall, and maybe the scuffle would have escalated but Mitch was yelling something about tequila shots in the kitchen and, yeah, why not?

“Wow,” Travis said, when they were halfway back to the dorm. “You are drunk as _fuck_, dude.”

“Shut up.” Nolan was leaning on Travis’s shoulder, maybe more like his whole body, and everything in the entire world felt warm and easy, even though the air was cold against his cheeks and he knew he was flushed like crazy. “Oh shit, my phone is—ringing?”

He tried to get it out of his coat pocket but kind of fucked up, watched it skitter out of his fingers and bounce along the sidewalk, land face-up with Ryanne’s name on the screen.

“You are too drunk for that convo, bud.” Travis poured him onto one of the benches in front of the Student Activities Center and retrieved his phone. Nolan landed on his back, looked up at the sky. It was a clear night, but there was too much light pollution to see much in the way of stars—not like it would be on the farm back in Winnipeg, with an ink-blue sky stretching for prairie miles and the glitter of the Milky Way swirling through it.

Nolan was thinking about the sky, and Travis was answering his phone, telling Ryanne some version of _turns out our boy is really into tequila, not sure it loves him back_ and _yeah, I’ll tell him to call you tomorrow, he definitely won’t remember tonight_.

“Yes I will,” Nolan said, reaching for Travis’s coat pocket. His fingers were halfway numb, from the cold or the alcohol or both, and it took him a couple tries before he managed to hook him in. Travis laughed and half-stumbled closer, looking down at him with so much—affection, or something, Nolan didn’t even know the word to use, but he didn’t ever want to forget what it looked like: the way his left cheek wrinkled up, the crinkles around his eyes. “I’m going to miss your dumb ass,” he said, because he thought maybe Travis would like to hear it, and it was true anyway.

“Aw, babe.” Travis touched his face, fingers cold against the heat of his skin. “You’re shitfaced.”

“It’s true.”

“That you’re shitfaced?” Travis gave him a hand, tugged him up; Nolan tripped on his own feet, which was a _profound_ fucking betrayal, and Travis had to hold him up.

“That you smell good,” he said. He was too tall to like, tuck himself into Travis’s shoulder the way he wanted to, but he tried anyway. Kissed his neck, got a mouthful of his coat collar and the hood of his sweatshirt, made an annoyed noise that made Travis crack up and grab him by the hair.

“Wow.” Travis tugged Nolan’s arm over his shoulder and started down the sidewalk again. “Tequila makes you say the nicest things, bud.”

“It’s all true,” he protested again.

“Yeah, we’ll see what you say in the morning.”

Nolan stopped, braced himself when Travis tried to pull him forward again. His center of gravity was all fucked but he was still big enough that Travis couldn’t really move him, if Nolan didn’t want to move.

“Oh my god, _what_,” Travis bitched.

Nolan said, “You are such a fucking dipshit and most of the time I want to wring your neck just so you’ll shut up for like, one second. But like. Babe. You gotta know.”

“Know what?”

“I like. Can’t even imagine what this year would have been like without you, even before you got good at blowies. So like. I wanted you to know that.”

Nolan blinked at him, because he was trying to be _real_, okay, and Travis was pulling out his phone, pointing it at his face. “Say that again.”

“What?”

“I’m filming that shit.”

“I hate you. I actually hate you.”

“That’s not what you just said.”

“I’m drunk,” Nolan pointed out. “I’m so drunk. Holy shit.” Travis’s phone was kind of—spinning.

“I know, bud.” Travis made a kind of _oof_ sound when Nolan flopped back into him. “We’re gonna get you some Gatorade, and put you to bed, and in the morning you’re going to be back to your grumpy-ass self. But I’m always going to know what a fucking cuddly and affectionate drunk you are.”

“No,” said Nolan, mostly to be contrary.

“Yes,” said Travis, and unfortunately he wasn’t like, _wrong_.

Everything was terrible in the morning: the light hurt his eyes, and he puked in the hall’s bathroom for the first time. 

“Rough night?” one of the Yateses asked when he was done.

Nolan made a face and brushed his teeth, and tried to scrub all of the tequila out of his pores in the shower. It didn’t really work.

“Woof,” Travis offered, when he’d staggered back to their room, holding a towel around his hips. “Have fun on that plane, babe.”

“I hate you. Never talk to me again.”

“You’re so fucking sweet, cupcake,” Travis grinned. He was halfway packed, shit thrown everywhere like he was going off to war, not like he was going home for three weeks. His train wasn’t leaving until the afternoon and Nolan was so, so jealous—all he wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep until his head stopped pounding in time to his pulse. “I got you another Gatorade.”

“Ugh.”

Travis stood up, knees popping from where he’d been kneeling on the floor, throwing socks into two different piles. “You’re gonna be okay, babe.”

“Am I, though.”

“Maybe if you make sure to lay off the tequila.”

The thought of tequila made Nolan gag, and Travis dove for the trash can he’d left next to Nolan’s bed. They’d mostly been cramming themselves into one bed since they started, whatever, fucking around, but last night Travis had tucked him in and then gone to curl up under his own sheets, and Nolan had missed the warmth of his skin and the smell at the nape of his neck, and he’d been trying to tell Travis that but he’d passed out halfway through.

So yeah, he was never drinking tequila again. “I’m never drinking tequila again.”

“And I’ll stay away from the Fireball, and we’ll both have better spring semesters.” Travis kicked the trash can back under his desk, since the imminent danger seemed to be over, and tentatively wound his arms around Nolan’s waist, let his forehead drop onto his bare shoulder. “You’re not going to boot on me, right?”

“No promises.”

“There are people who are into that.”

“Oh my god.”

“Not saying I’m one of them. So if that’s some of the weird shit you like—”

“Shut _up_.”

He could feel Travis smiling against the skin of his shoulder. “Just saying.”

“From the bottom of my heart: fuck you.”

“Maybe after break,” like he was joking, but not quite.

Nolan tightened his arms. “No rush.”

“Are you saying,” and Travis was laughing now, the little shithead, “that you don’t want to hit this?”

“I want to hit you, with my fist,” Nolan bitched back. Travis tightened his fingers against Nolan’s back, and kept laughing, and Nolan really needed to get dressed and text Ryanne back and call a Lyft to the airport but he didn’t want to do any of it—just wanted to stay exactly where he was, right now, with Travis snickering into his neck and fingers fidgeting along the edge of his towel where it met the small of Nolan’s lower back, not like he was trying to start something but like it was some kind of automatic reflex to get more, get closer.

“You need to go,” he said, finally stepping back and letting his fingertips drift a goodbye trail along Nolan’s hip.

“Yeah.” Nolan dragged on some clothes, opened Lyft on his phone. Travis had moved on from sorting socks to going through his t-shirts, and Nolan knew—just knew—that he was going to leave whatever shit didn’t go to Philly in the middle of the floor for Nolan to trip over when he got back in January. He somehow didn’t mind, though, which was a bad sign for a lot of reasons.

“Shouldn’t you be like, downstairs now?” Travis asked, looking up from his pile of crumpled t-shirts.

Right on cue, his phone started buzzing. “Shit.”

“Go, dude. Your four-star rated ass can’t lose any more points.” Then he snickered. “Your real ass is probably a five, though.”

“Why are you the way that you are?” Nolan asked, accepting the call from the Lyft driver and assuring her he’d be downstairs in a minute.

“Why are you still standing here?” Travis asked him. “Jesus, you’re dumber than usual today. I’ll walk you down ‘cause you obviously can’t be trusted to do anything. Here’s a puke bag,” and then Travis was picking up his duffel bag and sheep-dogging him out of the door and down the stairs, and Nolan realized that he didn’t want to go, actually. Didn’t want to wake up in the morning without Travis whining at him to make the coffee, didn’t want to go to the gym with Mads and work out quietly, on his own. He wanted to see his family, of course he did, catch up with Tanner and some of his old buddies, maybe fuck around on the backyard rink his dad still flooded every year.

But he also wanted—whatever.

He thought it was obvious.

“I’ll see ya in January,” Travis said, shoving his bag into the trunk and slamming it shut.

“Yeah, see you then.”

“Jesus, bud,” Travis snapped. “Get in the fucking car. You’re gonna miss your flight.” He opened the door, shoved Nolan into the back seat, and then paused, halfway through shutting it again. Nolan watched a few expressions flicker across his face, watched it finally settle into a warm little smile that lodged itself somewhere deep in his ribcage. “I’ll miss you too, asshole,” and he leaned forward again, brushed the suggestion of a kiss against the side of Nolan’s mouth. “Call me whenever you miss me too much.”

“Fuck you, I would never,” but the thing was, Nolan did: called Travis after he went pond skating with Tanner, after he came out to his family, a few nights when he didn’t have a reason at all, really, just wanted to hear Travis’s voice rambling about Christmas morning or pickup hockey or Lawson’s new girlfriend.

“You seem like you’re really—doing well,” Mads said, his last night in Winnipeg. She sounded skeptical.

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck _you_, Pattycakes,” she snapped, and punched his shoulder. They were curled up on the couch in the basement, vaguely watching the Ducks and the Yotes battle to see who could be more mediocre. “You were a fucking mess, don’t front.”

“Fuck you,” he repeated, then admitted, “maybe.” His phone chirped and he swiped it open—a snap from Travis of his half-packed suitcase, with a massive heart-eyed sticker and _can’t wait to see u babe_ ❤️❤️❤️

“Oh my _god_! You’re banging Fucking Travis,” she said, leaning over his shoulder to look at his phone. Because she was the nosiest older sister who ever lived. “It all makes so much sense now.”

Nolan could feel himself blushing. “Shut up.”

“Holy shit, baby brother.” She shoved him in the arm. “How did I not know this?”

“It’s like. Not a thing.”

“Those Patty cheeks don’t lie, so it’s definitely a thing. Holy shit! _When_ can I come down and meet him.”

“Never,” he said, but she already had her phone open to look at flights in April, so that was apparently happening. When Mads said she was doing something, she did it, end of story. “It’s kind of—new, okay,” he admitted, tweaking at the end of her long gold ponytail. “So maybe by April it won’t be happening.”

“Then we’ll just smoke up and talk smack about him.”

“Fine.”

“Can’t wait.” She smiled at him, pulled his arm around her shoulders. “I’m really happy for you, Nolan. I know I give you a lot of shit, but I know things have been hard and I’m really proud of you for getting through it, okay?”

“God, shut _up_.”

“Can’t I give you like, _one_ big-sister motivational speech?”

“No,” he said, and shoved her face into a pillow.

That night, after everyone had gone to sleep, Nolan padded back down into the basement, past the couch and the TV where he and Mads had halfway watched the Yotes grind out a W; past the laundry machine and the drying racks for Aimee’s hockey gear; and into the unfinished half the Patrick family used for storage.

There was a whole section devoted to hockey. Shitty sticks for fucking around in the driveway, a bag of pucks, a random assortment of shin guards and elbow pads and helmets.

And shoved behind all of that—like if he pushed it deep enough into the garage that he never had to see it, it would stop mattering so fucking much in his life—was Nolan’s gear bag.

He maneuvered it out. Didn’t bother opening it to look at what was inside, because he knew everything would still be arranged exactly the same as it had been on the morning he packed it at his billet in Brandon. He picked out two sticks from the rack, from the section that had _Nolan_ sharpied above it in his mom’s handwriting, with _is a Weirdo_ scribbled underneath it in Madison’s twelve-year-old scrawl; taped them together; and took everything back upstairs.

His mom and Aimee both cried when they saw the gear bag sitting by the kitchen door the next morning, waiting to get loaded into the truck. His dad didn’t say anything, but pulled him into a hug that was tight enough to make his ribs creak. Thumped him between the shoulders, hard, and neither of them was ever going to mention it if his dad got a little choked up, and this _wasn’t_ something Nolan would _cry_ over, but—

Mads had no such compunctions. “Stop crying, Nolan, it’s just hockey.”

Nolan was waiting for his shit by the baggage carousel when something hit his back, hung on, and said “Hey, babe!” right in his ear.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Travis, once his heart rate had dropped a little from the fear that he was getting stranger-dangered in the middle of an airport baggage claim.

“I came to pick you up, duh,” he said, like Nolan was an idiot who should have known he was about to get assaulted. He slid down from Nolan’s back, but stayed tucked into his side, and if Nolan felt some kind of like—warm bubble of contentment…well. Nobody was ever going to have to know.

“You don’t have a car,” he said, instead of _I’m happy to see you_ or _I missed you, even though it was only three weeks_.

“I got G to drive me. And then we’re going to pick Ryanne up for dinner, so you can see all your favorite people at once.” And sure enough, there was Resting Ginger Bitchface, scowling at his phone over by the doors.

“Claude is not one of my favorite people. And I was just gonna get a Lyft.”

“_I know_,” said Travis, with an extravagant eye roll. “I wanted to be nice to you, dickhead. See if I ever try that again.”

“Don’t bother, asshole,” but they were smiling at each other, and Nolan kept feeling these wayward like, _impulses_ to tuck a flyaway bit of Travis’s hair back under his snapback, or duck down to kiss his cheek, and it was horrible.

“That’s your suitcase, right?” Travis asked. He pulled it off the conveyer belt, then stopped walking back towards Claude when he noticed Nolan wasn’t moving.

“Got another one.”

“Jesus Christ, how much winter shit do you need, Winnipeg,” Travis bitched. “I thought we didn’t have real winter down h—” and then he cut himself off, because a black CCM bag stitched with _Nolan Patrick 19_ was bumping its way down the conveyer belt, between a bright pink roller-board and a camo-print duffel, his taped-together sticks following a few seconds behind.

“What,” Nolan deadpanned, grabbing his bag and propping his sticks on his shoulder.

“Wow,” said Travis. “That’s really—” and he stopped again, grinning and elbowing Nolan in the side. “Hey, G! Look at this shit!”

“I’m not joining the fucking team,” Nolan clarified, as they walked out the automatic doors and headed for the parking garage.

“Okay,” Travis said, still smiling up at him, and Jesus, he was going to walk right out into traffic if he didn’t watch where he was going. Nolan caught his elbow, just in case.

“We’ll see,” said Claude.

He didn’t—that year. But he skated with them more days than he didn’t, and kept working out with Travis while he and Mitch led the Rainbow Flags to their first-ever IM basketball championship. By their sophomore year Nolan had to admit that he might as well just join the damned team, and if it wasn’t the hockey he thought he’d be playing or the people he thought he’d be playing it with—well.

It had its compensations.

Like their spring break trip down to Congaree National Park with Claude and Ryanne sophomore year, when Nolan got to see how very _not_ outdoorsy Captain Resting Bitchface was, and how loud he screamed when a possum got into his tent.

And Travis kissing him on the ice after they won the ACC Championship Tournament their junior year (and their senior year, but by then Travis kissing him in public wasn’t new).

And somehow managing to live with Travis Konecny all four years of college, through all three times he changed his major, without murdering him; and somehow managing to survive two summers in different places, even if Mads was a liar when she said Nolan was _moping his codependent ass around Winnipeg while your boyfriend is hanging out in Dublin_ after sophomore year. (They were both in Philadelphia the summer before their senior year, Travis working youth hockey camps and Nolan doing a PT internship with Penn’s sports medicine program.) (It was like, a great opportunity. With a prestigious program. So Nolan definitely did not apply to it because he _couldn’t live without Travis for three months_, no matter what Ryanne might have to say on the subject.)

And getting blazed as hell on the porch roof of the hockey house—now _their_ house—the April before they graduated, and Travis spinning to look at him with weed paranoia written across his face.

“God, what.” Nolan closed his eyes, listening to the hum of the party downstairs and not worrying about a damned thing at all. Travis had a job lined up teaching P.E. at his old school, and Nolan was starting PT school in June, and they had signed the lease on a shitty apartment in Center City three weeks ago.

“Are you gonna get deported if I don’t marry you?”

Nolan hid his face in his hands. “You cannot be serious.”

“It wouldn’t even have to be a visa marriage.” Travis tugged on his wrist. “I’d marry the shit out of you, babe. For real.”

“You know I got accepted to Temple,” Nolan said into his palms. “Student visa—still a thing.”

“_Still_,” Travis said. “You could like, fail out of school.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, good buddy,” he said, as Travis continued uninterrupted with “But you can’t fail out of being married to me,” and Nolan said, “There’s this thing called _divorce_,” but Travis finally pried his hands off his face and leaned over, close enough that their noses were touching, close enough that all Nolan could see was the soft look in his eyes, and said, “I don’t think we have to worry about that, right?” and kissed him, and—whatever.

Somehow Nolan found himself agreeing.

**Author's Note:**

> hope u enjoyed! feel free to come find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/canarynary), where I mostly yell about the Flyers and catalog my dog's suffering.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Nothing to Prove](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22032058) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)


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